If You Must
by Sarah Rose Serena
Summary: Allison knows about death. She knows more about death than anything else. But it never ends there. With death. With the bodies of your friends & family cold in the ground. With the blood of the boy you love drenching your hands. It never ends there. And if it doesn't end, it can only get worse... Right? So she isn't optimistic about this new universe. These familiar strangers.
1. wait

.

**IF YOU MUST  
**

[a _Teen Wolf_ story by _Sarah Rose Serena_]

_if you must wait  
if you must weep  
if you must die  
if you must mourn  
if you must leave  
do it with me_

**wait**

* * *

When the fallen alpha walks into the loft, five heads turn towards the entrance. Five people all standing before the towering warehouse window at the other end. Arms folded, expressions grim, waiting for bad news. That is all they do these days. _Wait_. For bad news. For death and despair as another horror comes to town. Another loved one taken from them, fallen fighting the good fight. When the message makes it to their phones, a collective cryptic text summoning forth the group, they gather at the loft, waiting for an explanation, an answer, guessing at what strife could be next after all they have gone through with the last. And the last before that.

Nobody expected it to be _this_.

To be a friend … back from the dead.

Derek walks into the loft with an unconscious girl draped from his arms, her arms hanging as her head lolls backward over his bicep, acres of waterfall black tresses swaying from his motions. A _naked_ unconscious girl no less. And not just any girl. This girl has the face of a dead girl.

"What. The. Hell." Stiles is the first to speak, to break the shocked silence, but his voice is soft, distracted and barely a voice at all as confusion slips from his lips. No one can look away from the girl in Derek's arms. No one can move. As the wolf sets her carefully down onto the ragged couch, adjusting his leather jacket where it had been precariously sliding off her uncovered body, Stiles is again the only one to find the words. "Dude. What did you do?!"

As he straightens, glancing up away from the girl for a sidelong scowl, Derek tightly responds, "Nothing. She was just there. Out in the woods. Lying on the nemeton."

"Naked?"

"Yes," he bites back.

Scott pulls painstakingly from his stupor then, moving off without a word and coming back to kneel down beside the couch, a blanket in hand, replacing the hardly sufficient jacket to wrap her. He draws reluctantly back, lingering a moment to brush a silken lock of raven hair from her face, clearing her closed eyes, studying her every feature, every curve, searching for the lurking illusion. There must be one. This can't be her. This can't be.

"Be careful," comes Kira's tentative warning from his shoulder, standing awkwardly there with an urge to grab onto him. Her sloe Asian eyes are troubled and her timid voice is barely a whisper. "We don't know what she is."

"_Who_ she is," Isaac amends, just as enraptured as Scott, just as guarded and unwilling to hope. He stays farthest back of them all, keeping to the window, keeping himself tautly wound.

For all his forced hollow throws of normal irreverence, it is Stiles who can hardly look at her. Who can hardly hope. The guilt settles in the pit of him. Chewing up his insides. Dragging at him with an awful sickening darkness around his heart and stuck in his throat. This was him, after all. This was his body, his hands, which did this to her, to them. That brought them here. Whether he had a choice in all this or not will never really matter, whatever they all say.

It is Lydia who distracts him from the abyss, pressed faintly against his side, her own attention fixed exclusively on the illusion of her dead best friend, pale red brow furrowed, one hand raised to toy absently with the pendant at her neck. In typical Lydia fashion, she interjects incredulously into the deafening hush fallen over the loft, "What happened to her hair?"

Which is, ironically, kind of a good question. It has grown out longer than they have ever seen and returned to the former glossy glory of perfect cascade curls of shining black, a few sole streaks of crimson and blue woven through, reaching nearly past her elbows. The last time they saw her, it was short to her shoulders and lightened to a summer bronze, straightened and simple. But that is the only difference anyone can find. Her face, her body, every inch of her screams unmistakably of the girl who they all knew.

"This is some sort of shifter, right?" Kira suggests, looking about at the gaunt faces around her. "Some kind of conspiracy? A plot to infiltrate us?"

Thoughtfully, preoccupied, Derek only murmurs, "If it is, I'd say it's a strange one."

"Is it possible? Is this possible? That it could be…"

"Did anyone call her dad?" Scott questions, inserting soberly, strongly, into the quiet another leaves off. No one answers, and for that the answer is clear, echoing in the silence. The boy rises, forcing himself to turn his back on the girl, forcing his feet stiltedly away as he pulls out his cell to make a call no one in their right mind would ever want to have to make. A call that he owed her. Owed her father. Even if he didn't know what to say. Couldn't find the words for.

Lydia ventures closer, seizing the space he emptied, lowering herself hesitantly to a very edge, her hip to the girl's thigh, resting a trembling hand on the girl's chest as it slowly rises and falls in each sleeping breath. There is a tremulous energy to the redhead. The banshee. A fear and hope inextricably mingled they all understand. After a moment, she moistens her lips and shakily says, "She isn't dead."

"Obviously," Derek drawls, his usual dryness rasping there.

But that isn't what she meant. "Whatever she is, she isn't dead. She hasn't ever been dead."

And if anyone could know that, could sense that, it would be Lydia. No one asks, _are you sure_. No one asks, _what does that mean_.

Behind her, behind them all, Scott lowers the phone, snaps it shut as his fingers fist at his side. Darkly, disturbingly, he tells her, "She died in my arms. She was dead. This isn't her."

"You don't know that."

"Lydia, I know."

"You don't. Not yet." She turns, sending a sharp look over her shoulder at him, seeing his eyes draw to where her hand still lingers on the girl's chest. Above her beating heart. "It looks like her. It feels like her. Somehow. You don't know. It could be—"

"Please don't touch me," comes the calm request from said dead/not dead girl that makes the whole room freeze, makes Lydia leap up, wrenching away. Her eyes are open, cold, her face stoic. An impassivity about her as she lies there exactly as Derek left her, blanket tucked safely around her bared body, unmoved even a centimeter but for the lift of thick black lashes.

"Allison?"

"Yes," she confirms, slow to speak, flat in tone, her gaze going down from Lydia's stricken face, keeping fixed low at their feet, six pairs of stranger shoes, as she cautiously pushes herself upright. She takes the edges of the blanket with her, wrapping it about her shoulders from behind so as to be able to use her arms when she pulls her legs up, drawing into a casual ball. Her head stays low, kept downturned where they all catch only glimpses of her face, everyone getting a different sliver from their own angles.

"Do you know where you are?" Lydia asks.

"Derek's loft."

"Do you know who _we_ are?" Isaac asks.

"Most of you."

"Do you know what happened?" Derek asks.

"Not yet. But I will."

"Allison," Scott finally says, not taking a step forward, not coming any closer. "You were dead."

"No, I wasn't."

Pained, he insists, "I saw you die. We all saw you die. We buried you."

"No, you didn't."

"Okay. I don't get it," comes from Isaac. Glancing at the rest for help, he wonders, "How is she so calm about all this?"

Lydia explains, "She's in shock."

"No, I'm not. I'm just not who you think I am."

Slowly, confusedly, Scott asks her, "Then who are you?"

Hazel eyes still burning into the floor, arms locked at her shins, blanket shrouding her body, hair falling into her smooth expressionless face, she answers a question with a confusing question. "What year is it?"

Nobody says a thing.

After a second, a strange bewildered second or so, Derek moves back from his guard dog post towering over her, moves off to the kitchen, coming back a second later with a small calendar that he offers out to the girl. She reaches from between the folds of the blanket, a bare arm extending to slide the piece from his grasp with deceivingly delicate fingers that don't quiver even a little bit, not until she reads the date. All she says, as she sets the calendar aside, is a soft, "Oh."

"What year did you think it was?" Lydia gently wants to know.

"Not this one."

"Um. I know you're probably just as worried as we are, but could you try explaining it for us?" Kira braves suggesting after another awkward round of silences, since they still don't seem to be getting anywhere.

Only to be overrun by Derek's brusque, "If you even are who you say you are."

"She _is_," Lydia stubbornly insists, but the wary look she throws her speaks to her own doubts. "Maybe she just isn't what we were expecting."

"Did any of you have anything like expectations for this?" Isaac asks. "'Cause I know I didn't."

Turning backward, Derek shifts his stare to Scott. "Is he coming?"

"He didn't answer. I left a message."

"This is not a voicemail conversation, Scott!" Lydia admonishes.

"I didn't explain. I couldn't."

Derek mentions, "I don't know if him showing up to this with no warning is any better."

"How long has is it been? Since I've been gone? How long has it been to you?" a dead/not dead girl impassively asks, and everyone shuts up.

"Awhile."

Suddenly, everything about her changes. She looks up for the first time, lifting her head with a swift jolt of infused life, of reaction. Jarring her from her controlled shell for the shove of surprise. At the sound of _his_ voice. His steady solemn voice as it appears for that one grave word. Tellingly. Reluctance and guilt and darkness keeping him drawn back from the rest of the group of friends. Of allies. Family. _Pack_. Whatever one chooses to call it. But when she hears it, when she looks up and sees him standing there, hardly able to bear looking at her for the reminder she is of what he has done, the damage a dark spirit possessing his body, his mind, his soul has wreaked across all their lives, she becomes human, becomes real, reacts like they have been waiting for.

Only nobody expected it to be _Stiles_ that triggers it.

Barely holding onto the blanket covering herself, Allison unfurls with an abrupt rise to stand, practically flying off the sofa, crossing the distance in a heartbeat without ever seeming to sprint, gliding almost as she bypasses Derek to her left and Kira to her right, Scott behind him and Lydia behind her, Isaac at the window. There is a split second when she lurches into motion, into life, where he blinks and thinks she is charging to attack. To kill him in a fierce fiery hunter fury that the badass Allison Argent he knows just might be apt to for indirectly causing her death and all. Never in a thousand freaking years would it have ever occurred to him that she would throw her arms around his shoulders and yank him into her, arching up against him as her body crashes into his own, as her mouth meets his own, slackened in shock as it is, her fingers curving over the nape of his neck, forcing him into a breathless head spinning kiss.

Never in a thousand freaking years. Really.

And she gives it her all. She gives it a _lot_ of all. So much so that his knees do some buckling. Eyes wide open in abject startled horror, he throws his hands up and out, pointedly screamingly _not_ touching her back. An unwilling participant in all this. A hapless victim. She kisses him hard. She kisses him good and hard. Like they've done this before. Like they're about to die. Kisses _him_. Not Scott. Not Isaac. But _Stiles_. Which makes him relatively unsure that this isn't just yet another one of his bizarro waking dreams. He won't even address the spark. The electric arc. That entirely unexpected hot heady fevered confusion threatening to come over him. Because this is _Allison_. Scott's Allison. His best friend's Allison. His brother's Allison. Only she wasn't really that when she died. She was more of Isaac's by then. But still. _Allison_. Bizarre is the right word.

As weirdly and abruptly as it started, it ends. She drops back onto her soles, fingers releasing from his nape, slipping softly down the curve of his neck and along his chest, lingeringly drawing away from him with this _look_. She doesn't look shocked, like they are, and she doesn't look guilty or ashamed or seriously stumped, like they are, but she looks … devastated.

"You're not Stiles," she says, speaking on a whispered breath, a hurt heartbroken realization. And then stronger again, more resolved, more Allison, "You're not Stiles."

Reeling in an awkward daze, he glances about the room, skating across the others and their matching stupefied expressions, scratching briefly at the back of his head as he shakes off the heat and dizzy spinning and that uncomfortably lingering feeling of maybe having been secretly deeply unwillingly more into _that_ moment and that _thing_ she was doing than he ever would want to be. Than he should have been. "Uh. More likely is you're … not Allison."

But she knows who she is and she knows who he isn't and she doesn't try to defend herself against the collective shock that is quickly settling into dangerous suspicion all around her now. Not meeting his eye, but she angles toward Derek when she says, "I'm going to use your shower." Then walks away from them all. Climbs the cramped spiral iron stairs, blanket tightly around her, heading into his upstairs without a backwards glance.

_How does she know where my shower is?_ his quirked eyebrow says when the ex alpha turns to the rest of them, standing around staring like useless idiots.

Defensively, irrationally defensively, Stiles sputters into the silence, "It's an adjustment, right? Coming back from the dead."

"She wasn't dead!" Lydia exclaims, exasperation evident. "She was never dead."

"Which means that thing up there isn't Allison," Derek declares.

To which the redhead murderously glowers. "Maybe it just isn't _our_ Allison."

"What the hell does that mean?"

Halted, she shifts her feet, catches her elbow with her hand, begrudgingly admitting to them, "I don't know. Yet. Let me think."

Which is when Peter Hale walks through the door. Walks in to stop and stare. Taken off guard by the six heads that turn his way. The six strange expressions. The air of unwelcoming turmoil in the tension of the crowded loft. Glancing outside over his shoulder in wary curiosity, he wonders, "What's going on?"

Isaac says, "Allison is upstairs in Derek's shower."

Lydia says, "She seems a little confused."

Kira says, "But definitely alive. Whoever she is."

Scott says, "_What_ever she is."

Derek says, "She kissed Stiles."

Peter blinks. Gives a heave behind his back to slide the loft entrance shut. "The little huntress kissed Stiles," is what he echoes, out of all that, which just goes to show how strange a statement it really is. Then, "We're talking a friendly reunion peck?"

Stiles finally finds his voice. "Uh. Nope. Full on hungry hunter makeout kinda. With tongue." Scott and Isaac rumble deep in their chests, faint reflexive growls at the same time making them look sideways at each other, uncomfortably aware. "Wha— Well, it wasn't _my_ tongue!" And then, "Okay. The laughter really isn't necessary."

But everybody finds it so freaking funny. Except the ones who really don't.

"And what are we going to do about this?" is Peter's wryly insincere lilt.

Upstairs, scalding water streams over pale skin, rinsing the mud and soot down the drain as she stands beneath the spray, one hand splayed against the wet tile of the wall, keeping her up when her body tries to fail her, tries to sway and give out. She combs drenched hair back from her forehead and tips it upward into the pounding cascade, closing her eyes, concentrating on staying standing and keeping breathing. She is weak and tired, her body completely depleted, but what is worse is the defeat. She is absolutely and utterly defeated. It went wrong. Everything is all wrong. This wasn't how it was supposed to be. This isn't where she was supposed to land.

Her heart is breaking. All over again, her heart is _breaking_.

For a moment, only a moment, standing under the shower spray as it pelts down her body and burns her, she thinks about giving up. Letting go. What else is there to keep fighting for? To keep this charade in motion? She failed. It's over. Done. Her last chance is slipping from her fingers as she watches it go. And she is too tired to close her fist and try to hold on. But then this one passes like all the rest and she manages to draw in a deep breath. Manages to stay standing. To bury it all again and forge ahead. With hope. That is the only thing that lets her breathe. Lets her not die to welcome the darkness. Not denial, but hope. She clings to it, a dark despairing fire and steel kind of sensation that keeps her going. _Hope_. She has to hold on. She just has to hold on.

In the dresser by the platform bed of the upper loft, she finds black leggings, black tops, a belt, a black jacket, and boots buried under the mattress. One pair has heels and is too small, the other way too big and shaped for a man, but she makes do. The clothes are a tight fit but she pulls them on and buckles up and it works out fine. She guesses they must have belonged to Cora. His sister. If things are even remotely similar here to what she knows… Only they aren't. Not even close. What little she has seen of this place already pretty much proves that. She wonders if Cora is still alive too. Everybody else seems to be. Things are so different here. Things are… It's like a reset or something. Like a second chance to start all over again. But it isn't. Not for her. Because all those people down there may be alive, but they aren't hers. She knows their faces, but nothing else. That isn't what she did this for. What she sacrificed for. To come here. To be surrounded by familiar strangers? No. That wasn't what all of this was _for_.

She needs to find out what went wrong. She needs there to be a chance to fix this.

But first she has to get the hell out of here. She doesn't want to see their faces. Doesn't want to be around these people. It hurts. It tries to distract her. She needs to go.

Pausing at the top of the spiral staircase, hand falling to the iron, she hears Peter offer lightly, "Could be a succubus. They make a habit of taking on other faces."

"A what?" is Scott's dense reply, half uncomprehending and half resistant.

"Sex demon. Feeds off sexual energy but also gets juice by causing strife of the lover variety."

"She is not a succubus," the boy growls, frowning hard at the man for suggesting such a thing.

But this turns Stiles to considering. "I dunno, man. You weren't on the other end of that kiss." Nodding agreeably, he decides, "She definitely could be a succubus."

"That's how Allison kisses," Scott defends, to which Isaac chimes in, "That's her thing."

"Wait, I thought you thought she wasn't Allison?" Lydia needles, earning a discomfited shrug. "And anyway, she is not a succubus. This is our friend. I'm sure of it. Just because she kissed Stiles doesn't mean she necessarily has to be some kind of evil monster trying to kill us all."

"Thank you!" aforementioned Stiles gratefully interjects.

"Interesting theory," she says evenly into the lull, making all their heads turn to look up at her there on the stairs. "One problem though. Succubi can't hide their marks of Lilith." Lifting a hand, she tugs the jacket sleeve to expose her wrist to the room. The clean unmarred curve of alabaster. "Indentations shaped like waves over the vein. Razored scar tissue."

Lydia gives the boys a flat look. "Who else would know something like that?"

"So who found me?" she asks, descending the stairs step by step, slow and calculated.

"Derek did."

Looking his way, unfazed by the gloomy glower permanently etched into his brow, she gives him a subtle nod of gratitude, reaching the floor. At the hem of the jacket, she catches the zipper and slides it up. Heads for the exit without another word. But when a semi reformed psychopath steps into her way, his thick arms folded on his chest, his intention clear, her stance stiffens into a rigid offense. Darkly, she warns, "Get out of my way, wolf."

"Peter," Scott tries to ward him off, but the elder ignores his warnings. Ignores hers.

"Think it'd be better if you don't go running around town just yet. You are _dead_."

"That's my business." One hand smoothing unconsciously toward where her holstered dagger should be, Allison flatly tells him, "I've killed you once. Don't make me put you down twice."

Though he looks piqued by the threat, intrigued by her confidence, a steel sharper edged kind of bravado than he remembers of the hunter's girl, bravado that is not bravado at all, Peter doesn't put up a fuss when she stares him down. Amused, he sidesteps, eyeing the congregated group past her shoulder and their varyingly worried expressions. She pushes forward without looking back as gazes burn into her. More than ready to get the hell away from them all. To be back on her own. Where she can think. Where she can breathe.

But when she jerks the sliding warehouse door open wide enough to walk through, she finds another man standing in her path. A man she can't menace. A man she can't manage. At the sight, she staggers backward, air escaping her lungs in a choked hiss, hazel eyes flashing wide and shiny. "Dad," she gasps, a ragged whispery exclamation, horror and angst and shame twisting up in her, matching the gutted look on his face as he sees her, as he recognizes his dead daughter.

He doesn't say anything. He can't speak. He just stares.

And suddenly, so suddenly, so overwhelmingly, she can't handle this. She can't— _She can't_. Not like this. Not Stiles and Derek and Scott and Isaac and Lydia _and_ her dad. So she says, "No." Then, "_No_." Turning away from him, she clenches her jaw and struggles not to cry, not to sob so hard she suffocates herself, skating a frantic erratic gaze over the gathered group, her control in serious conflict. A panicked cornered wild animal that doesn't know what to do. "Just … forget you ever saw me. _Forget_ it. Allison is still dead. Got that?"

Keeping her head down, she hunches her shoulders, hands shoved violently into her pockets, and barrels past the frozen man in the doorway, nearly knocking him back into the hallway wall in her hurry to escape. She runs, flat out runs, and doesn't look back. Can't look back. Because she had wanted to say, _Daddy_. Wanted to throw her arms around him and bury her face in his neck and breathe him in and never let go. Wanted him to hold her while she cried. While she sobbed. Screamed. But that can't happen. He isn't her father. Her father is gone. She buried him herself. Like that Stiles she kissed isn't hers. Her Stiles would never have looked at her the way he had. Would never have not kissed her back like his life depended on it then made some stupid joke about how hot for his scrawny body she must be. And it would fall flat, like it always does, but it would make her laugh, like it always does, despite everything dark and miserable around them. Despite the fact that there really was not one damn thing left in their life to laugh about.

Even if she'd never run from a fight, not a real one, because she is brave and she is strong and she is an Argent, she doesn't have a qualm about running now. This isn't a fight she is ready for. Isn't a fight she can come out on the other side of even _half_ unscathed. She does what she needs to do in order to survive. She does what she needs to do.

* * *

TBC


	2. weep

.

**IF YOU MUST**

**weep**

* * *

Three days later, Lydia finds her up in the hills, sitting on a rock by the teetering edge of a cliff at their overlook spot. She knew it was a risk, coming here, knew this might be something shared, something _this_ pack knew of, knew was hers, but she hadn't worried enough to resist the impulse. She doesn't care. Sitting alone under the silvered moon overlooking dark night lights of the town, maybe part of herself wanted to be found. It's been a trying week. Month. Year. But these last days have been different. Before, when every horrible thing would happen, piling on top of each other, she always had someone there, holding her hand. Holding her in his arms. Bringing her a little bit of solace. Something to hold onto. Full of one dead end after another, letdown after letdown and missing threads, her week has been worse. She is at a loss. So maybe she isn't as opposed to being found by Lydia Martin, at this particular interval, whichever Lydia Martin she is.

"So I think I've figured it out," her companion announces, climbing out of her smart blue car to flounce up beside the brunette and claim a spot on the rock.

"You usually do," she mutters mildly, arms rested loosely on her knees, looking off.

"You're obviously Allison, and you're obviously not dead, but you're from a different timeline. Am I right?" She waits half a second, gets no response, and nods herself. "I'm right. You can't be from the past, because you know us, but you're not from the future, because you're dead and all, and besides you actually look a little older. How old _are_ you?"

"Nineteen since November."

"Wow. Okay. The college coed streaks in the hair make a lot more sense now." The distaste is plain as she flits a glance over the brunette's choices of hairstyle before moving on. "So it has to be some kind of alternate timeline cross-dimensional confusion thing. Right?"

"That's the way it seems," Allison answers, still not anything but mild, but distracted.

"Which is why you kissed Stiles instead of Scott. Things are different where you come from."

"Scott?" For the first time, she actually turns her head towards Lydia, an incredulous frown of disbelief furrowing her heart-shaped face. "Why would I ever kiss _Scott_?"

"He was your first love here. Then you guys broke up and you and Isaac started to—"

"Isaac?" she interrupts, halfway to a choke. "You've _got_ to be kidding me."

"Yeah. I never understood that one either. It didn't get far. You died before it could."

"I thought my thing with Derek was bad," she mentions idly, wondering what kind of person their version of Allison must have been to take advantage of a vulnerable submissive like Isaac by involving herself with him. She is too hard, too sharp, has too many cutting edges to be good for a boy like that. And with all that _her_ Isaac had already been through, even if it had occurred to her, she would have never let anything happen between them that way. It would have been disastrous. It would have been mean of her. But maybe this world's Allison was a softer person. Someone who could take care of a fragile heart like that. With a living dad, maybe a mom, all her friends intact, a romantic tie to _Scott_ of all people, Isaac too, she must have had a pretty nice life.

Maybe this other Allison had a sane Aunt Kate.

Thinking in that vein, she lets her legs drop off the edge of rock and finds one hand stroking unconsciously over the covered expanse of lower stomach, feeling the jagged ridges of scar tissue that linger in a harsh braided mess across her pelvis beneath a cable knit sweater. The reminder of everything dark and ugly, everything brutal about her life. The constant reminder of who she is. That she will never have children. Or normalcy. Or _happiness_. That this fight will never be over. Not for her. Because this is all she knows. This is all she is good for. But feeling the marks makes her wonder if a big part of why their Allison was so different, was probably a bright shiny person, is due to the fact that she might not have spent six days on that stone floor of that dank basement with crazy Aunt Kate teaching her how to be harsh. Taking away the softness.

When he found her there, she had been lying for hours already, bleeding out, her aunt's body heavy where it slumped over her thighs, her own dagger turned against her, shoved into her chest in the girl's brief split second adrenaline surge of vicious killing retaliation, her last ditch effort to save herself from the pain. Killing Kate didn't save anybody, much less herself, but Allison did it, and she doesn't regret it. Stiles finding her, staying with her the way he did, how he held her and called out, sounding so scared, so desperate, dragging her out from under the long dead woman, rocking unconsciously as he gripped her tight, screaming for help. It was that day that made her see him. Really see him. That day that something was born between them, a bond, a connection, deep and visceral and unpretty and _necessary_, and it never really went away. She didn't want to, wasn't receptive to it, and sure as hell didn't make it easy on him, but he was _there_ for her after that day. He was just … always there. Thrown together by circumstance. By incidental occurrence. But it became the most important thing in the world. That tether. Something to hold onto when she was going through hell and just had to keep going. He said that to her a lot, pushed her to not give up and let go, kept her moving forward, kept her _hoping_. Sometimes, she thinks they never really got out of that basement. That they were still there, her bleeding out on the floor as Stiles rocked her, cradled her, yelling out for help that seemed like it would never come.

Maybe this world's Allison didn't have that. Maybe she didn't need it.

"Umm," Lydia ventures reluctantly, uncertainly, breaking the thick quiet that had fallen over as the two girls sat side by side. "When you say _thing_ with Derek—"

"It was a long time ago. It was destructive. It all worked out. I don't want to talk about it."

"Great. Good. Don't talk about it. Like ever. Don't mention it to the others, alright?"

"Sure," she says, because it's no skin off her back. Especially since she has no intention of ever seeing _the others_ again. Not if she can help it.

"So… Do you want to tell me what happened?" the redhead prompts.

Images flash through her mind. Taunting voice coiling like a snake, flooding her like poison. She knows that isn't what Lydia meant, but the memory comes unbidden anyway. Brought back to life by the slide of her hand over her stomach, by Derek's name on her lips, on the recollection of Stiles and that basement and that basement before Stiles got there.

* * *

"_I had him first, you know. Your hunky teenage rebellion. We were kind of a thing." The cool tip of the blade slices into soft skin, drawing just a drip of blood, just a slivering rivulet. Allison shudders but can't fight back. The pain is a throbbing paralysis as the volts from her taser still seize into her. "What would Daddy say, I wonder? Should I tell him you're shacking up with your mortal enemy? Playing with werewolves? It's okay. Really. I did it too. I know how good they taste. How fun he is." She wants to say, _stop_. She wants to say, _it wasn't like that_. She wants to say, _please don't do this_. _What is wrong with you?_ But her tongue is thick and clumsy and her jaw refuses to unlock itself as electricity still sears through her body. "But I want you to know better. You're thinking this is more than just dangerous sex. I see it in your eyes. But I need to be a good aunt and show you how things really work. You're a hunter, Allison. He's a monster. He's your prey. It's alright to play with prey, sure, but never forget to finish them off. You're starting to get stars in your eyes. You're starting to act like they aren't our hunted. What? You think you might settle down? Have some wolf pups and pick and choose which monsters need killing? They all do. And you won't. Look at that. So much blood. Isn't it beautiful, Allison?"_

* * *

When it all gets boiled down, Kate Argent was just a jealous woman. A psychotically unhinged jealous murderer. Broken from reality. She had slept with, screwed, and stalked Derek Hale while she set his whole family on fire. She was fixated. Obsessed with him. Obsessed with hurting him. Giving into the forbidden attraction a confused fifteen-year-old hunter's daughter felt for him was supposed to be a simple short-lived illicit thing. Teenage rebellion, as her aunt had called it then. She didn't know nothing would ever be the same because of that one stupid decision. She didn't know she would never come back from it. None of them would.

"What do you want to know?" she offers, gravely, dutifully, resolved to state the facts. Or lie.

"How did you get here?"

Allison sighs. "Witches. Godforsaken witch bitches. Never trust a witch. But I was desperate. And now they screwed me, whether it was sabotage or just incompetence, and the witch I need is dead in this timeline. Car accident a couple of years ago. I've been trying to locate the rest of them that were involved in the spell, but I don't know how to connect to her coven. I don't think there _was_ a coven in this timeline. Not the one I'm looking for."

"You weren't trying to get _here_, were you?"

"No. Not here."

"Where were you trying to get to?"

"The past. My past. I was aiming for a specific pivotal moment. The spell was precise."

"Why would you want to risk everything to go back in time? To change the past? You have no idea the consequences that could create."

"Yeah, well, it doesn't exactly matter now, does it?" she snaps, hair flipping over her shoulder as she moves with the vehemence of it, shifting a hostile look at the other girl.

Lydia quiets at the irritability. Sobering. Plenty aware that there is a lot she doesn't know here, about this Alter-Allison and where she comes from, what she is willing to do or why she is willing to do it. She wants to reach out. To take her hand. To hug her. But she is too smart to risk that yet when this Allison is so blatantly unpredictable. Softly, she whispers, "Why go back?"

"Stiles," she says, looking out at the night sky, at the moon, almost cold. "It was for Stiles."

All of it. Everything was for Stiles. That first night and the step backward she took away from the cliff instead of going over, his blood still soaking her shirt, her hands, streaking her pale cheek unwashed away by the thousand tears spilled since she let go of his body and turned her back. She was going to go over the edge. Gladly. Without hesitation. But then the hope rekindled and called her fight back and her perseverance kicked in. For Stiles. It was for Stiles. Wading through witch after witch, searching for one who could do what she needed, leaving a trail of death in her wake. There was always death in her wake. Surrounding her. An unending graveyard. That was her life. _Is_ her life. He was the last one standing. He was the last thing she had. This was for him. And she should have known it wouldn't work. It never works. She should have known not to hope to have him back. To set things right. There is no _right_. There is no _fix_.

Not wanting to know, but needing to, Lydia asks, "What happened to Stiles?"

"I killed him," she answers, simply, straightly, her mask smooth and flawless, not a fracture in its surface, not a hitch in her tone, not letting on that the sharp jagged glass her insides are made up of these days gives another deadly crack as the words leave her lips.

Gravely, her companion assumes, "The nogitsune."

"The nogitsune? No. That was an earlier horror. The nogitsune," she murmurs after a moment, pausing thoughtfully, getting lost in history. "The nogitsune took Scott and Isaac. It took you too, in a way. But him we saved. We brought him back from the darkness."

"I'm … dead?"

"Might as well be. After the nogitsune…" She stops for a minute, not quite cavalier but close to as she explains, "Well, he broke you. It got to be too much. The voices. Your curse. It got so bad, eventually you ended up in Echo House. Still there. We visited you a lot at first. Almost every day. But it always…" She stops again, swallows, rethinking the way she was going to say what she says. "We upset you. Said we made the voices louder. Every time we came, it triggered another episode, so we just stopped coming."

"Oh." The redhead doesn't know what to do with this information. The whole banshee thing is still so new. Alter-Allison just described the absolute worst case scenario Lydia has been haunted by since the curse first awoke in her. So she moves on to tackle an easier angle. "So, in your world, Scott and Isaac are dead?"

"They're all dead."

"What?" she whispers breathlessly, caught off guard by the succinct toneless sledgehammer of her blunt statement. She stares hard at the side of Allison's face, pale green gaze burning into her, willing her to be the Allison she remembers, to be her best friend, a familiar comforting easy thing to be that she really wants right now, really needs, but the brunette won't turn her way. She won't be the old Allison.

And when she does turn her way, does look at her, she wishes she hadn't. That flat expression. Those dead eyes. It hurts. It scares her. "Yes, Lydia. They're all dead. Everyone we know. All dead. Everyone we care about. Everything that matters. It's all gone."

"But—"

"First it was Kate. She started it all, really. Killed your boyfriend because he liked me."

"My—"

"Jackson. Then there was Danny. And Erica. I killed Kate. But by then the ball was rolling and nothing was gonna save us." She turns away again, casting her focus out across the dark skyline, having mercy on the other girl, softer girl, however sharp her tongue. "And to be honest, I really didn't care about any of them. Those first victims only bothered me because they were people that I knew, that I tried to save, and they were just kids. Kate was what hit home. But then there came a murderous alpha pack and our ranks started thinning pretty damn quickly. Derek got his baby sister back just to watch her die all over again. That one messed up Stiles pretty badly because he really liked Cora. They were going to be a thing. I was trying to talk him into making a move when the alphas attacked. She was gutted right in front of us. We couldn't help her. And then things got worse for Stiles because his dad was next. Melissa McCall took him in, but he was never the same. None of us were by then. Scott's dad came back to town. He was the next victim of this hellhole. Peter Hale started a killing spree through the town to punish me and my family for what Kate did to _his_ family. Deacon and Aidan and Coach and my mom before we put him down. Before _I_ did. My sociopathic grandfather took out Ethan and Boyd, my cousin Emily and my boyfriend Michael and almost killed Scott's mom before I helped Derek and my dad take him out. Peter used you to come back from the dead and cost Malia her life. Second time around, Derek handled him, but it was messy and Melissa didn't make it. We were trying to save my dad, and you and Isaac too from the nemeton sacrifice rite when we went under in the ice water, taking your places, which worked for you and Isaac but my dad ended up caught in the crossfire in the final fight anyway, so killing myself in that water was for nothing after all. He… He jumped in the way to save me from a shard of broken glass to the neck. Later, we realized what we'd done. How our dying fed the nemeton in a way that opened a door that never should have been opened. We let in the nogitsune."

In the disquietingly deafening silence that stretches out when she finally winds down from her morbidly uninflected listing off, Lydia is left severely speechless. And deeply … _deeply_ disturbed. What did one say to all that? _Sorry you came from such a slaughter happy never-ending funeral life. That sucks._ God, and she thought _her_ timeline was horrifying. Because she doesn't know what else to say, because she doesn't want to even contemplate half the things Alter-Allison just mentioned, because morbid curiosity makes her have to ask, "Did it take Stiles on your side too?"

The brunette heaves a gusting sigh, shaking off the tirade. "Yes. It took Stiles."

"And drove me crazy."

"And killed Isaac and Scott," she adds, bringing her knees back up onto the rock to wrap them with her arms, resting her chin there. She isn't holding herself. She looks almost casual in a weird detached emotionless kind of way. "Once they were gone, once Derek saved him from the spirit, Stiles moved into the loft with us. We were the last three left, and I'd been living in Derek's loft for awhile before then, so it was just a natural reaction to come together. If we stayed together, closed ranks even tighter, maybe we wouldn't lose anybody else." She leaves it there, letting her voice taper off, letting the silence speak for itself. Then she licks her lips, bites into the lower one, debating what to share, how to finish the story. She doesn't want to go to the very end, and that is why she makes herself, why she takes it all the way. "For a little while, it was okay. We were alive and we were messed up but we were making it work. But then you were getting worse and Stiles was slipping away from me. He couldn't take it. The guilt over what he did. He couldn't control himself when the nogitsune took over, but that didn't matter. He knew what he'd done. He was slipping away and I couldn't stop it."

"If it wasn't the nogitsune…" Lydia trails off. Watches her closely. "Why did you kill him?"

"I did something. Something I never should have done."

"What did you do?"

Allison turns her head. Looks Lydia right in the eyes. "I asked a witch for help."

_Never ask a witch for help_, she thinks, fingers furling into fists, nails biting into the skin of her palms as she struggles to tamp down the sudden swell of violent rage and grief locked inside her. _Never. Trust. A witch._ She was supposed to help him. She told her she could help him let it all go. She _promised_ her that she could pull the darkness out of him. He was spiraling. He would have imploded soon. He would have been lost. She thought she had to do something. She thought she had no choice. She thought the witch would really save him. And instead…

"_Kill me," he says, looking up at her with raw broken eyes, blood dripping from his spread hands, shaking under the wetness, under the red._

Allison sucks in a sudden shuddering breath, stinging in her lungs, struggling to keep the box locked tight inside and survive.

_What have I done? What have I done?_ he kept chanting. Clutching at his head. Crying for her to save him. He didn't understand what was happening to him. He didn't know it was her fault. She tried to tell him, tried to explain, but it didn't matter. It was too late for explanations. It was too late. What he'd done… What _he_ had done, not a dark spirit, not a demon, just him. There was no coming back from that. And still she tried to hold onto him. Clung to him in desperate vicious stubbornness because she knew she wouldn't make it a day without him. But he just kept crying. Screaming. He just kept begging her to save him. To stop him.

"It was my fault," she tells Lydia, not capable of elaborating. "So I did what I had to do."

_I did what I had to do._

_I did what I had to do._

_I did_…

_I had to._

_I had to._

* * *

TBC


	3. die

.

**IF YOU MUST  
**

**die**

* * *

By the time they pull up in front of a dark Stilinski house, Alter-Allison is asleep, head against the passenger window. Her arms are crossed, hugging herself. Lydia knows what kind of reaction she will get before she rings the bell, but she does it anyway. The sheriff's vehicle isn't in the drive, so she isn't worried about waking him up. She knows it's just Stiles.

"Whoa. _No_. That is _not_ a good idea," he says the second he yanks the door open and skids into its frame, catching sight of the redhead on his stoop then the unaware brunette in her blue car at the curb beyond his mailbox. "That is a _bad_ idea. Bad bad idea."

"It's okay. She won't go all homicidal hunter on you. And I already explained the differences," Lydia insists. "She knows there is no Allison/Stiles kissing allowed here."

The boy brings his silver eyes down onto her face at that, tearing his attention from the curb, from the troubling undead girl in her passenger seat. She makes him nervous. Makes him panicky. "Right. Exactly. None of that. Ever."

"Stiles. She doesn't have anywhere else to go."

"Uh, hello? Her dad—"

"Look, it turns out wherever she comes from is a seriously crappy place. Like whole other level of crappy than we've ever known, as bad as we have it. So just sit with that a second." She glances warily back at the car. Lowers her voice. "Her dad is dead over there, okay? And she isn't ready to see him yet. And cramming her under the same roof as Scott and Isaac? Get real."

"Take her home with you!" he exclaims, flinging up a hand her way in emphasis.

Archly, "How should I explain that to my mother? Who thinks Allison Argent is _dead_."

He just cocks an unsympathetic eyebrow. "Witness protection?"

"_Stiles_."

To which he sighs. Looks away. Scrubs a hand through his dark spiky hair. Falls back heavily against the doorjamb in defeat. "Okay, fine. Bring her in. But I don't know how I'm gonna explain all this to my dad."

"Tell him the truth. He always liked Allison. I'm sure he won't mind helping this one."

"Yeah. Right. Sure. He won't mind."

Allison stirs when Lydia climbs back in behind the wheel. And when she sees where they are, she goes eerily still, a rigid deadliness about her that makes the other girl grip the wheel, feeling a little at risk. The house they're parked at is darkened, front door left ajar, no sign of Stiles in sight. He went in, probably back to bed, and left Lydia to weather this resistance on her own. She knew she might not be thrilled at the suggestion, which is why she didn't suggest it, only waited for the young hunter to fall asleep on the drive over before she started turning the right corners, but she hadn't expected it would make her _this_ intense. She feels the energy coming off of her in choking waves of unhappiness. Poised on the precipice of indecision. A hostile panic. And she realizes she might have miscalculated just how much pressure Alter-Allison can handle.

Voice carefully modulated, she tells her, "It's okay. You're okay."

"Why did you bring me here?" the brunette demands, sharp as steel, about to fight.

"This is the best place for you. You'll be safe here."

"I'm not worried about being _safe_, Lydia."

"Well, I am. I'm worried. If people see you around town, recognize you, it will start this whole big thing. And it isn't safe out at night anymore. We've been having more monster problems now than ever. I could've put you up at a motel past town limits but I'm not going to do that because you shouldn't be alone. You don't have to be alone, Allison."

"After everything I told you," she counters, unfazed by the redhead's concern, seriously pissed. "I told you those things so you would understand. So you wouldn't do stuff like _this_."

The hesitant and extremely tremulous trust she had earned from the older girl so far breaks apart and turns her dark eyes hard on Lydia again, back to glass, back to cold abrasive rejection. She had just begun warming to her presence and she had to go and bring her to _Stiles_. But she is not going to be talked out of this. She is not backing down. "He wants you here. He is your friend. He cares about you. But if you'd rather stay with your dad—"

"That man is not my father," she snaps, cutting Lydia off. "His daughter is dead."

"Then go inside, Allison. Get some rest." Starting the car, she reaches across and shoves open her passenger door, pulling back to level the hunter with a sternly supportive look. "It's just Stiles. You can do this."

After a long moment of staredown tension, Allison draws a bracing breath and grabs her bag from the backseat. On her feet outside the car, shoving the door shut hard, she bends and sends the redhead a sad quiet glance, saying softly, "You just don't get it. You have no idea."

She doesn't wait to watch the taillights fade. She doesn't turn and find some vacant house or local factory to break into and crash. There isn't anything she'd rather do than not walk through that door. Which is why she does. It hurts, and she needs to hurt. It scares her, and she needs to be scared. She needs to be pushed. If she isn't pushed, she thinks she might just fall and never get back up again. So she grips the strap of her bag as it hangs off her shoulder, fingers cramping they tighten so fiercely around it, and she takes another deep breath, a steeling breath, and she forces herself forward, forces herself up the paved drive and onto the brick stoop. She hasn't set foot in the Stilinski house since the sheriff's memorial. As she hesitates there on the threshold, staring at silent darkness ahead of her, she remembers that day. Remembers holding his hand. Holding him upright and in place as he stood and greeted the procession line of mourners paying their respects for his dead dad. Nodded and mumbled pointless replies in a hollow voice, his grip clenching her to the point of pain, her chin lightly on his shoulder, keeping him tethered. That night, as the last of them cleared out, she stood in the doorway to his bedroom and watched him throw things into a duffel, not paying attention to what as he stuffed it full, trying to talk him down on what he had decided to do. But she couldn't and he wasn't dissuaded, so she followed him out and looked back at the burning house of his childhood, the only home he'd ever known, looked back and grieved for him, because she knew that he couldn't. And now, so far away from that moment, so far from anything like salvation for any of them, especially for him, especially for her, how is she supposed to just take that step and cross inside? Pretend this isn't killing her. That this isn't _wrong_.

"You can come in," he says quietly from the archway into the living room, off to the side down the main hall, lurking in the shadows of the house, leaning against the oak trim, his arms folded and his eyes solemn as they watch her from across the distance.

The girl takes one more breath. It comes in stinging and goes out shaky. She licks her lips and lifts a hand to tuck long messy curls behind her ear, clearing her face. "Yeah," she says, since there was some question to his statement, speaking mostly to herself. "I can come in."

It still takes her a minute to move. But when she does, when she crosses inside and rotates to close the door behind her, he pushes off the archway and steps into the hall, gesturing downward. Hesitant and unsure. Wary of the familiar stranger. "It's this way."

"I know where your room is," she dully retorts, following his lead, impatient and unfriendly, but still so sober. Quiet. Unsettling.

"Oh. So you've been here before," he realizes, looking back at her, feeling her near to his side, stating the obvious because he can't find his footing with this girl and the quiet drives him crazy. "I guess you and your Stiles were friendlier than me and my Allison. I should've guessed already, what with the whole kissing thing—" He stops sharply, yanking up short with a wince and a look flickering across his face like he wants to smack himself. He had obviously decided that he wasn't going to mention their first meeting. He'd intended to pretend it never happened. Then promptly just blew it. So the resultant silence is pretty uncomfortable.

However different this world is, she still knows Stiles. She knows him so well it hurts.

"Here," he says, breaking the awkward freeze, giving his doorknob a twist and letting the door swing slowly inward. He moves a little to the side, inviting her in, not going in himself. She pauses for a second, her eyes lingering on his bare feet against the dark hardwood, his checkered blue PJ bottoms and faded old gray T-shirt. Lydia was right. It's just Stiles. Which means so many things_. Just Stiles_. Being so close to him, right in front of him, it means so many things. It is comfort and agony all at once. She wants to pull him against her, but she wants to run, because she knows he isn't who he should be. He isn't hers. He doesn't know anything about her. There is no tether to hold onto between them. There is nothing. And that _aches_ so badly. If she said half the things she needs to say to her Stiles to this one, he wouldn't understand. He wouldn't know. She almost tells him the truth, standing here, watching him watch her warily, nothing in his eyes of what has been in his eyes every time he looked at her for the last three years. It's on the tip of her tongue. Just to see his face, to punish herself in whatever way she can, turn him against her. She thinks that may almost be easier than this. But instead she goes in, brushes past him without a word, letting him be wary and detached as he offers, "You can take my bed. I'll crash out on the couch."

"Thank you," she says, for something to say, not acknowledging him but for the absent mutter as she walks the room, feathering fingers along his life. A sunny silly photo of Stiles and Scott and Lydia just being stupid teenagers sits on his desktop. She stops to stare at the image, her back put to the boy, ignoring his unease, blocking him out.

Her smile is soft and bittersweet. Faint as could be. Painful to look at. He feels intrusive in his own room, as she examines his own belongings, feels like he is intruding on her, like he is seeing something he shouldn't. It lessens a little when she moves on, circling the room, becomes less of a palpable claustrophobic feeling. She trails a fingertip over various oddities, her head tipped aside, her expression clouded, as if some walk down memory lane. Red string. Tattered and webbed off his wall. The bulletin board with its current research. The strategist's bestiary. A scatter of pennies on his bureau. He isn't even here for her. He doesn't even exist. This is her space, her world, so he doesn't interrupt. Wants to back away but finds himself fixated. Perversely fascinated by watching this weirdly private gravity of a moment.

It isn't until she drops the tracing hand, fingering a knob of his bureau, pulling the drawer out and finding a folded flannel shirt at the top of the pile inside, that he is shaken from his awkward voyeuristic stupor. Because she brings it up, gripped in both hands, and presses her nose into it to take in a breath, and this all gets abruptly too disturbing. That's his favorite shirt.

"Oka-a-ay. I'm just gonna…" He reaches in and pulls the door closed. Stands in the dark hall outside his room, suddenly more like her room, and sighs tiredly into the silence. Thinks dryly, _Well, that wasn't weird at all_.

On the other side of the door, Allison listens to it click closed, breathes in another taste of his scent from the shirt, his favorite shirt, memorizing the sensation in case she starts to ever forget. It hasn't even been two months and things are already starting to slip away. She doesn't want to lose this. The smell of him. The sound of his voice. The feel of his heart under her hand. She lost so much. She can't lose that. She can't forget.

Shucking off a leather jacket, she pulls her top over her head and drops it on the floor before she pulls the flannel on and buttons it up. Her jeans go next, dumped on top of the pile of others, her boots too, climbing under the covers. It was her shirt anyway. In her time, by then, it was her shirt more than it was still his. He didn't mind. This one does, she knows, but the one that didn't is dead now and that makes her want to scream, want to kill something and keep killing and keep screaming and never stop, so she pretends he doesn't mind. Pretends it doesn't matter.

* * *

"_Is that it? Is it done?"_

"_It's done," she hears the witch say, wrenching her gaze off the blue flame as it dances away in the bottom of the basin, eating up the stolen photo, the sacrificed gold badge of a long gone sheriff. She looks up to see the witch's eyes glowing blue too with the power._

_Hope hardens to hunter menace. "How will I know if it worked?"_

"_You'll know. The darkness will be gone."_

"_If something went wrong_…_" She knows better than to let a witch work magic. Never mind help her do so. But she wants to believe. Needs to believe. She doesn't have many options left. This has to be legit. It has to be. "If you're playing me, I'll be back. Bet on it."_

_When she makes it back to the loft, it is long after midnight and she expects them to be asleep. She enters carefully, quietly, dropping her bag by the door, sliding her pistol into an end table drawer right beside it. She glances up, catching sight of herself in the mirror hung above it, takes in the dark sunken circles around her eyes, the tired dullness of the hazel orbs. Feels the tired deep in her bones. In her soul. Thinks again, _This has to work_._

"_Allison," comes Derek's low gravel from the kitchen, pulling her that way when she would have gone straight across the studio space toward the bedroom nook around the corner. She glances up at the spiral stairs with a mildly irritated twinge, wishing he'd been in bed, not wanting to have this conversation tonight. Or ever. But instead he is standing by the fridge, glass of orange juice gripped in his hand, shirtless and barefoot in a loose pair of knit pants. And glowering knowingly at her with disgruntled suspicion. Gruff voice kept hushed, he demands, "Where have you been?"_

"_Out," she returns evenly._

_He doesn't buy it. Challenges, "You smell like stress. And magic."_

"_Do I?"_

_The wolf watches her for a long moment, studying her features, seeing through her, or trying to. Then he gives up, looks away, unable to break down her indecipherable stare. He upends the glass in a slow pulling swallow, leaving a little bit left in the bottom when he sets it down atop the island and goes to walk by. At her side, he stops, pausing to find one big hand clutching at her side, another on her wrist, fingers banding the bone, pressuring her with the hold. Leaning in close, his jaw brushes at her cheek, bristling soft skin with his stubble, his mouth nearing an ear when he whispers warningly, "I hope you know what you're doing."_

_Then his touch slips away and he leaves with it, going back upstairs, abandoning her in the dark. She stands stuck where she is for a minute or two or three or an hour, listening to the utter silence, feeling the weight of an ocean bearing down on her, drowning her, swept in the undertow. She made her choice. However it turns out, she made her choice. It's too late._

"_I hope I do too," she murmurs after him, hardly hearable._

_Picking up his glass, she finishes off the juice, rinses it out and sets it in the sink. Moves into the cordoned off area of their bedroom with the acrid taste coating her tongue. His back is towards her, his breathing steady and relaxed, safely deep in sleep. Her eyes are on the line of his shoulders as she strips out of her clothes, watching him and his stillness in the shadow and moonlight cast through the industrial window. Those shoulders were once as narrow and bony as the rest of his fragile frame but lately becoming the lean breadth of subtle strength with age and muscle acquired along the way in their struggles. He wasn't scrawny little Stiles anymore. Wasn't the hyperactive smartass boy who liked playing sidekick to his werewolf best friend. But he had always been stronger than any of them. He'd always been more. She just wishes he hadn't had to lose those parts of himself that made him an innocent. That made him an optimist._

_Down to a camisole and boxers, she slips painstakingly into bed on her side, lifting the covers to try and avoid waking him. But as tired as she is, she just can't get to sleep herself. She lies there flat on her back in the darkness, looking at the ceiling, its metal rafter beams crisscrossing themselves. Lies there and listens to his heart as it beats. Listens to him breathe._

Please let this work. Please let this work,_ she thinks._ Please let us be okay.

_Eventually, she must pass out. Because suddenly the sun is seeping in, bathing the loft in orange and golden, reflecting off the glint of clear gray eyes as they cast her way, piercingly untroubled for the first time in a year. And that smile. God, his smile. Her heart stops for a second, blinking tiredly, groggily, not sure she is awake yet even though she can't remember falling asleep. He is propped on an elbow, lying on his side, staring at her. His expression is something she hasn't seen on him since_…_ Well, she doesn't know. She can't remember._

"_Why are you staring?"_

"_Why can't I stare?"_

"_Uh_…_ Because it's creepy?" Swiping at her mouth, she turns off her side, landing on her back. Stretches out. "What? Was I drooling?"_

"_I like your hair. Did I tell you that?" he wonders, catching locks of black curls tangled from bed, sifting them through his fingers, drawing attention to the woven red and blue dye newly added to it. "I know Derek insulted it, but I kinda like it. Something different. Looks good." He reaches silk tips and crooks his fingers, corralling it onto them, leaning in and finding her lips for a soft lingering kiss that makes her smile against his mouth. Makes her hope. She dyed those streaks three months ago. He never said a word. Now he is waking up easy, happy almost, and he is talking about her hair and kissing her like he used to, like their first kiss. Maybe. Just maybe._

"_You seem good," she murmurs gladly as he pulls away, her lashes at half mast._

"_I am good, Ally. I don't know why, but I am good." He lowers again, head turning as his chest presses gently down onto hers, his nose grazing the line of her jaw as his lips find her throat and he trails touches along her collarbone, breathing her in, his grin marking her skin. He hasn't called her Ally in a long time. The hope strengthens, spreads through her, makes her heart flutter anxiously at the question and the answer and the uncertainty regarding each. But his palms bracket her ribcage, getting up under her cami, sliding it high to expose her stomach, and his mouth moves down with it, thumbs brushing the underside of her breasts, and he smiles crookedly when he glances up at her in clear uncomplicated ease of mind, saying lightly, "It's a brand new day."_

* * *

Stiles has been dreaming about Allison Argent since the nogitsune. Since he got her killed and will never forgive himself. Will never be forgiven, not deep down, by his brother, his best friend. She haunts his dreams and tortures his nightmares. But he has a feeling tonight will be different. He has a feeling the Allison dreams will be worse. Twisted and confused. Two different Allisons for the price of one. He wishes she wasn't here. Hates himself for it, yes, but he wishes she wasn't. The other one is always with him, a blunt weight sitting on his chest, making it unbearably tight. Always with him, like a shadow, a haunting ghost. He doesn't need another one. He doesn't need to be lying on his couch in the middle of the night listening to the muffled sobs of sad Allison 2.0 behind his bedroom door. Meeting her, seeing her, it only makes the weight of the original even more excruciating. Because he is powerless to change the past. And he hates it.

The pillow isn't enough. It drowns out the crying when he jams it against his ears, but since he can't unhear the sound, it isn't any better not being able to hear her. He isn't going to get to sleep, might as well not even try, but he doesn't drag himself off the couch until the screaming starts up. The top-of-her-lungs guttural _screaming_. Throwing the comforter off, he jumps and sprints quick across the hall, bashing the door open, catching the jamb to stop and stare, to absorb the sight of her lying in his bed, her spine arched painfully off the mattress, her face twisted and agonized and teeth gritted, her hands fisted in the sheets, legs kicking under the covers. Trapped like an anvil is crushing her chest, pinning her down, and she is fighting with everything she has to get free of it. Feeling acute sympathy for the sight, how close to home it hits, he pushes into the room to drop onto the edge of the bed and grab her by the shoulders, shaking her awake.

"Allison. _Allison_! It's alright. Allison. Wake up."

"Stiles, don't—" he hears from behind him, so he knows his dad is in the doorway.

But all he hears is her scream, her ragged raw scream, and he misses the warning in his voice, misses the guarded quality of it, so he keeps pulling at the girl, keeps calling her name, willing her awake from her fight. Which gets the sharp side of a dagger shoved against his throat as she jolts out of her subconscious. Releases the sheets with a snap as her body reverses its arch, lurching up and driving him hard onto his back at the foot of the bed, her knee digging harshly into his chest, her blade held dangerously at his Adam's apple. Teeth bared, face drawn fierce, body heaving with panting breath, black tresses fall over her shoulders, pooling on his stomach, curtaining her face, a messy wild out of her mind feral girl fresh from some inescapable horror from her own making. Hazel eyes flutter half open, gleaming with violence, with fear and pain and shining with tears in her disorientation.

"Dad, wait. It's okay," is the first thing he says, holding his father back when he moves to come forward and pull her off. Hands held placatingly near his shoulders, Stiles stays cautiously frozen, lays flat on his back beneath her where she put him, not trying to resist. He couldn't buck her off if he wanted to, but struggling would only escalate things. The way she is looking at him, her eyes skating side to side over his face in rapid jerks, not really seeing him yet but just beginning to see where she is, who he is, to remember the way things are, to come to her senses. Voice soft, as low and steady as he can manage to make it, he tells her, "It's okay, Allison. Right? Everything is okay. Nobody wants to hurt you."

"I'm the one that hurts you," she mutters back before she can stop herself, expression clouding with comprehension, with the strife of conflicting realities. Her face smoothes for a second or two in that familiar mask but it slips again, her grasping at control, refinding her center. Going hard, going cold, she states roughly, "I don't know you. Say it."

Like handling a cornered animal, Stiles echoes, "You don't know me."

"I don't know you," she says again, breathing slower now. Beginning to calm. After a second, she eases off of him, pulling the dagger off his throat and flipping it up against her forearm as she brings it into herself, arms together at her chest, falling back and curling onto her side at the wall, shutting her eyes, counting inhalations. Breathily whispering to herself, "I don't know you. I don't know you. I don't know…" Until her voice drifts off.

The instant the blade retracts and her knee lifts, he rolls off the edge onto the floor and takes to the hallway with his father, watching and white-knuckling the doorknob. Frozen for a minute. Stuck on the sight and sound of her. This isn't an Allison he can imagine. He doesn't know what just happened. He doesn't wanna know.

When he closes the door, back pressed strong against it, he looks at his dad, at his questioning demanding expression, and can only sigh. Raking a hand through his hair, he pushes off to brush by as he says, "I'm too tired to explain this tonight."

"In the morning then," Sheriff Stilinski compromises. Just as weary.

Padding back to the couch, Stiles assents, "In the morning."

Hopefully, they'll all still be alive by then.

* * *

TBC


	4. mourn

.

**IF YOU MUST**

**mourn**

* * *

In the morning, Allison finds the sheriff in the kitchen, drinking his coffee, all uniformed up. She put a white tank top on beneath the commandeered flannel, rolled up its sleeves, left it loose and unbuttoned but tied the tails together under her bra, a clean pair of denim low-riders and her hair fixed up out of her face by a sloppy topknot. She only has a few materials to work with seeing as all she has got is what she stole, no money, no wallet, no resources. She had planned to be out of the house before either of the Stilinski boys were up, but it was a rough night, so she overslept. It takes her a minute, hesitating in the archway off the hall, drawing in a quiet breath, trying for a casual controlled mask. Then she walks in, doesn't stop to look at him, heading for the cabinet to get herself some clayware. She pours herself a mug from the steaming coffeepot when he moves, leaves it black because she doesn't want to take the creamer he offers out, his demeanor cautious, watching her closely while acting like he isn't watching her at all.

After a steadying sip, its burn on her tongue grounding her nerves, she turns around and leans against the opposite counter from him, letting him stare from above the maroon rim of her mug. He holds his own half forgotten, a hand propped on the counter edge behind him, sunlight warm and incongruously hopeful coming in through the window over the sink at his back. She liked her version of Sheriff Stilinski. He was a good man, a good father, an even better cop. He wasn't fond of her in return. Thought she was too damaged, too troubled, and would've preferred his son find a softer girl to befriend, a girl with less cutting edges to love. He never said so outright to her but all the time she spent at their house, before he died, before it burned, she could just tell. She saw the worry in his eyes as he watched them together. It hurt, but she couldn't blame him. This one likes her even less, she sees. They haven't really even met yet and already she worries him.

It hurts, but she can't blame him.

The silence isn't comfortable, far from it, but it isn't horrible. It's filled with a thousand things nobody wants to say. A thousand things nobody can find the words for. But because, when it truly comes down to it, he is the same man in either alternative, he has to say _something_ before she can slip away. So he asks, right as she almost escapes, "How is the PTSD, Allison?"

A pointed unveiled implication insinuating so many things that she won't talk about with him or anyone else here. A deceptively casual question, loaded with meaning. Downing a last swallow, she sets the mug on the countertop at her hip and pushes off, answering evenly, "I'm handling it." A dismissal. A warning.

"Are you sure about that?" he challenges gently, stopping her halfway out of the room.

The girl turns her head, meeting his concerned eyes, his fatherly eyes, his cop eyes, out of the corner of her own. He thinks she's not safe. That she's not safe to be around his son. And she can't defend herself. She isn't safe. She isn't anywhere near safe.

"I appreciate the place to stay, Mr. Stilinski. But it was just the one night," she promises softly, her tone uninflected and her features indecipherable. "I don't belong here."

Back in the boy's bedroom, she shuts the door behind her and listens to the man wash up and walk out on his way to work. Feels an increment of relief at one less presence to keep in mind for. Now she just needs to do what she has to do and get gone. She starts on that by dropping into his swivel chair at the desk and booting up the laptop left there. With one heel hooked on the edge of the seat, she curves her arm around her shin, fingertip scrolling the touchpad to open up a server. For a bit, she wastes time trying once more to track down the coven that got her into this mess in the first place, but there isn't any better luck on that front than there was yesterday and the days before that in the public library terminal. So she gives up. _Relents_. Types in a name she never ever wanted to have to use again. Finds the right witch all too easily.

Who is a lot closer than she anticipated. But that is a small break. She hadn't wanted to look for this one at all, had been half hoping she would turn up dead in this timeline, because Allison was afraid of what she might do if she ran out of options and was forced to come face to face with her again. Any version of her. But here she is, run out of options, and needs to get this done quick before she spends any more time with these people, before she lets them infect her with their faux familiarity and the glimmer of potential affection, of connection, which is only an illusion anyway. Weakness is a thing she fights off hard these days though. If she lets herself get past the pain and get used to being around them, it might get easier. Like it already has with Lydia after just a night. If it starts to get easier, she might not want to leave. And she has to leave.

She has to leave.

Writing down the address, all the information she has, she uses her pinched burner cell to dial Lydia's number. But the tone announces it is out of service, so she must have a different one here. Taking the smartphone off its charger on his desk by the laptop, she spins the office chair around and leans back as she scrolls his contact list to find her name.

"Stiles? Is everything okay? What happened?"

"Not Stiles," she says into the cell, noting the redhead's voice, full of stressed alarm.

"Oh. Allison."

"Where are you?" she asks, without letting in a lull for further interrogation.

"Derek's loft. But—"

"I need a favor."

"We're kinda in the middle of something. I'll call you back."

Lydia hangs up before she can catch her interest. That was what the distracted tension was for in her voice then. Something was going on over there. Something dangerous most likely. She may have zero interest in getting involved in their business, or their troubles, but she isn't very good at sitting on her hands, waiting around, and she wants to be out of this place before Stiles wakes up, so she grabs her bag and gets moving. Slips out the front door without a sound to broad daylight, pausing only briefly as she passes the archway to the living room, glancing reluctantly at the boy sprawled unconscious on the couch, his comforter tangled and twisted and mostly on the floor, one leg hanging off the end, an arm thrown over his face, snoring away.

It's a long walk to Derek's.

When she gets there, of course she finds the loft in the midst of a supernatural standoff scene. Alpha male style. The warehouse sliding steel door is left ajar, unhappy voices growling aggression further inside, so she slows her walk down the corridor, easing toward the opening. A massive guy blocks the center of the studio, a massive mountain bulk of muscle and preternatural strength as he holds sinewy Isaac hostage by the throat for leverage, his wolf talons digging dangerously into the boy's carotid. He isn't backing up toward the door, trying to escape, but pushing forward like an instigator forcing his way inside. Peter Hale stands deeper in, watching the progression of this with a guarded stillness, a tense anticipation. He takes a subtle step to the right, putting himself in front of a frightened Lydia, almost absently protective. Or possessive. With a werewolf, it really is the same thing. And she thought this timeline couldn't get any stranger. Peter Hale possessive of Lydia Martin. How odd things are here. And then there is Derek. He faces off with the intruder front and center, claws out, ice blue wolf eyes shining. Ready for a fight.

_Maybe_. Maybe if this was her world, she would wait and watch for how this situation develops or wander into the edged impasse and ask about what the hell is going on. But this isn't her world and these aren't her people and so she doesn't have the patience to do either of those things now. She has a goal, a mission, a hope and tactical action in sight, so she isn't going to be slowed down by hormonal werewolf territory bullshit.

Moving silently, stealthily, Allison pulls a steel blade from her waistband and crosses the short gap from the open door to the uninvited guest. Takes care of the problem with one jarringly quick hammer of a jab. Knife in the back of the neck. He drops, dragging Isaac with him, dead and over before anybody registers what just happened. Lydia gives a little yelp of shock but the boys all just stand and stare. Derek retracts his claws, eyes turning back to brown, his black brow knitted hard, and Peter only relaxes his rigid stance, falling against the nearest column as a mildly amused arch comes over his seen-it-all no-stake-in-this expression. Lydia is left gaping at her past his shoulder. Like she did something shocking. Something totally uncalled for. Which she doesn't get. He was a bad guy, right? Their enemy? He wasn't acting very friendly. Didn't she just save them some time? But that isn't her concern. Their reactions, their perspectives, their feelings, whatever way they do things here aren't her business. All she does is shrug it off. And leaves the blade right where it is, not bothering to retrieve it, but straightens out her shirt and releases a breath.

"He's dead, right?" Derek checks.

To which his uncle lazily utters, "Severed spinal column over there? _Yeah_. He's dead."

"Oh, my God. _Allison_. What the hell?" Lydia exclaims, exasperated, aghast.

"Don't act like I didn't do you a favor," is all she returns with, not looking up.

Once he shoves the lifeless mountain off him, Isaac wipes blood from his face, from his throat, a bit of it his own, and looks up at her like an alien, like a nogitsune went and body snatched his girlfriend. Except when she offers him a hand, he only hesitates a shaky second before clasping it, letting her pull him up. Detaching as soon as he is on his feet, when he would've lingered a little, she pretends not to notice the way his fingers flex at his side as she lets them go, like they tingle, reacting to her touch. She remembers what Lydia said about their Allison and Isaac getting into some sort of entanglement. She feels a stab of pity for the boy, standing at his side, ignoring him staring at her with a conflicting mixture of puppy dog admiration and sorely inadequate longing. Pity for what he lost, and for how disappointing she must be to him. To them all.

They all stare her way, watching her like a freak at the zoo, waiting to see who she'll kill next, but she turns her eyes directly to Lydia. _Only_ to Lydia. With a flat mask emptying her expression, a dully expectant tone, she says, "Free now? I need a ride."

After a minute, a minute of them all just staring silently, she calls the redhead's name and lifts a prompting brow. Snaps her out of her staring stupor. "Uh. Yeah. I guess… Yeah, okay. Let's go." She sounds distanced, distracted, becoming more like the others, more wary of the unknown girl. "My plans are cancelable."

"Great," she mutters idly, offhandedly, following the off balance girl when she passes warily to reach the door. Glancing back at the three males as she tells her, "I don't do buses."

_Not since the vampire attack junior year_, she thinks, ignoring the pressure of their eyes fixed into her back as she goes. Derek doesn't mention the scar while she is there, but she sees his gaze lingering where it is hidden beneath her shirt, knows he must have seen his full of it the other day when he found her naked on the nemeton. It bothers her, knowing this stranger Derek has seen something so personal to her, something he won't understand. Another sharp reminder of who these people are. And who they aren't.

In the car, down on the street, she belts up and pops the passenger seat backward to a slanted angle as her companion pulls away, hoping to get a little rest. To ease the hammering headache as it keeps throbbing at her forehead. She isn't in good shape, she knows, but can't tell whether that is due to the witchcraft and shift travel or just a natural consequence of her life. She hasn't slept in weeks. Not really. Not restfully. Not since Stiles. That does things to a person.

"Where to?" the redhead lilts ironically.

"Ashland," she answers, elbow propped on the sill, hand at her nose, blocking the sun.

"Where is that?"

"Oregon. Just stay on the interstate."

"Wait. What? Allison, I'm not going to _Oregon_."

"It's only a four hour drive. We can be back before dark."

"Allison. _No_."

"Lydia," she says, opening her eyes and turning her head to give her a look.

Twenty minutes later, an interstate sign is passing them by. They turn onto the entrance ramp and Allison shuts her eyes again, striving for a little relief from this pain. This squeezing torture in her brain. The ache in her chest is an old one. However excruciating it becomes, she can always carry it with her, keeping herself uncompromised. She got used to it awhile ago. But a headache is a headache. It's dangerous. Distracting.

After an hour or so of driving in silence, listening to tires on the road, Lydia glances sidelong. "So, you and Stiles." Her voice is soft, deceptively casual, and her attention turns back to the road. "How'd that happen?"

Allison doesn't move. Doesn't open her eyes. She isn't asleep. Just resting. "We were friends," she answers after a long pause, very tempted to pretend, to let it go by ignored, but ultimately giving in. Some part of her buried deep and neglected begging for the chance, for the connection of best friend familiarity, even if this isn't her Lydia, isn't her friend. Even if for the longest time it was Stiles that was her best friend in the world. Simply, succinctly, voice quiet, "We were friends. And then we were more. And then we were all each other had." _And then he was gone_.

"Oh." She mulls that over for a minute. Then, "Um. Just curious, but was he in love with me?" Lydia wants to know.

The hunter lifts her head from the window for just a second. Observing the feigned disinterest of the other girl's profile. "Since preschool," she drawls dryly, eyes rolling skyward.

"So some things are the same."

"A few."

She doesn't ask what that means. Doesn't ask if Lydia ever gave Stiles the time of day here as anything more than a friend, the way she didn't in Allison's timeline, because she doesn't want to know about it if she did. She doesn't want to know about how happy everybody is here. The way things are different here, the way things are better, she doesn't want to follow the conclusions of these observances. Doesn't want to notice that things are different here and better here and that is probably because of one and the same. That things are better _because_ they are different and so that must mean that everything she knows, everything she experienced, all of that led to what was wrong in her world. That she and Stiles were never meant to be together, to ever love each other, because look how that turned out. The obvious conclusion is that this world is so much better for all of them because, in this world, Allison Argent is dead. She already knew that. _Thought that_. Wondered and feared if things would have turned out the way they had if she had been the first one to die. _Would I have been the only one then?_ _Was it me?_ But she knows the answer already. And so she doesn't ask. She doesn't wanna know.

"You didn't tell me. How that happened. You and Stiles. You gotta give me more than that. From where I'm sitting, it seems so … unbelievable."

Allison doesn't answer. But she remembers.

* * *

_Three weeks after Cora dies, Allison almost bites it too. She goes out looking for a lead and ends up taking on ruthless Kali on her own. Barely staggers out of that fight still breathing. Stiles rushes her outside the industrial complex she got cornered in. Followed her like he often does without her knowing he knew what she was up to. Catching her as she tries to make it away. Make it to her car. She won't be able to drive. She is shaking badly enough trying to get her keys out. Trying to get to it. He rushes her, skidding up short to keep from bowling her over, from worsening the damage he can see is there. Hands landing on her hesitantly and strongly all at once, clutching her arms, shoulders, looking her over. Panicked. Urgently. Angry._

"_Are you insane? Or just incredibly stupid all of a sudden?! Why would you do that?"_

"_I'm fine."_

"_No, you're not. Look at you."_

"_Stiles, I'm okay. Really."_

_But she is struggling to stay on her feet and cradling a fractured wrist to her bloody stomach and pretty sure she won't be able to stop the collapse coming in five or less seconds. But then he grabs her face between his hands and kisses her. In his panic and relief and anger all tangled up together, he just kisses her. An unplanned uncoordinated intense mash of mouths. Their first. And she is so shocked, so distracted, that she doesn't drop to the cement after all. She stands there and lets him kiss her. They're best friends, so they just don't do that. But he does. And she doesn't mind._

* * *

The witch owns an unimpressive looking back alley occult shop up in Ashland. Her name is Mercy Madison. She has pixie cut blonde hair and cold green eyes. She is a powerful practitioner. So powerful that Deacon once told her to never cross the state line because she has a sure distaste for hunters. More so than even her grudge against werewolves. She likes power. Uses her magic to accumulate more. Not to help people, not to make a living or utilize her gift, but to feel the rush. She uses blood magic in a way the druids shun for. Which is why Deacon warned her away from Beacon Hills when she came searching for a boost from the nemeton. Warned her off with a show of overkill strength. With every single one of them left standing at the time lined at his back with tightly closed ranks. And then Deacon was dead, everyone was dead, and _Stiles_ was falling down the rabbit hole, and so Allison did what she promised she never would, and she crossed state line. She went looking for a ruthless power hungry witch. And she found one.

"Stay here," she tells Lydia, popping the passenger door and climbing out, ignoring her protest as she starts to shout a complaint in her wake.

How could she ever explain her and Stiles to this Lydia? She never actually explained to _hers_. She didn't have to. That conversation basically consisted of her admitting finally, _I'm in love with Stiles_, and Lydia giving her a huff and an eye roll in return, countering impatiently, _you think?_ That was that. But this one doesn't get it. None of them do. Because their Allison wasn't like her. Wasn't _anything_ like her. And this Stiles… He doesn't love her. He never did. And he doesn't even understand the idea of such a thing. Of possibly loving Allison Argent.

She can't tell yet whether that makes things easier on her here … or unbearably harder.

"We're closing."

"I'm not here to shop," she says, bell jangling overhead when she steps into the dark interior. The witch is behind her checkout counter in the back. Her eyes are downcast on the ledger she is busy scribbling in. The girl isn't fooled for a heartbeat that she doesn't know what she is. Or why she came. "I'm looking for a castor."

Which makes her glance up. Meet the girl's gaze. "I don't do that anymore. Not for strangers."

"Oh, but we're not strangers, Ms. Madison. We're old friends," she tells her softly, a bit slyly as she meanders about the shop, fingering draped crystals and displayed amulets on her way toward the counter, remembering the feel of this woman's blood soaking her skin, her warm heart held in Allison's squeezing grasp, her ravaged chest as she dropped. "I'm in the wrong place." The sight of her inconsiderate face makes the girl itch to do it all again. "The wrong version of this dimension." To send her straight to hell. The rage awakens as she comes closer. The sickening rage she felt as he deteriorated, as he cried and yelled and begged and she did what she did, as the witch told her there was nothing to be done, told her this was the risk she had run. The name _Mercy_ was hollow. An ironic awful joke. Allison has no doubt this one is no different. She wants to murder her again. She wants to let the cold numbing rage take over. Again. But she can't. After all that she has done, she _owes him_. She owes all of them. "And I need you to send me back to my own."

"Alternate dimensions? Timeline shifts? You want me to shift you through time. And space." The witch pauses, gives a little scoffing laugh, a disinterested mocking. "Fascinating. Really, it is. This problem you've got. Unfortunately, I don't have that kind of power, kid."

"I know." Reaching the counter, Allison stills directly across from her, a block of glass the only barrier protecting her from vicious primitive pain. As much as she knows, as much as she can see, the witch has no idea the kind of danger she is in, the kind of control it takes the hunter to keep a cruel smile and dead eyes and her hands to herself. "I know where you can find it." Lifting an arm, she flicks the chain around her wrist loose, doubled up as it is, and lets it drop, uncoiling to hang like the pendulum swing of a pocket watch. Only the pendant at the end of the chain isn't a watch but a medallion. She waits for the witch's gaze to zero in on the insignia etched across the bronze. An ancient sigil. "Proof my word is credible."

"The talisman of _Chasseur Quêtes_." A gleam comes to her eye. "Where did you get that?"

"Family heirloom," Allison answers, not too upset over the fact she technically had to steal it out of the Argent armory. Because technically it isn't _her_ family heirloom. Not anymore. Not here. But committing theft against Chris Argent is the least of her sins. Tossing it at the witch, she waits for her to snatch it from the air before she says, "Keep it."

"Potent," the witch grants, and then adds, "Hardly enough."

"Consider it a down payment. A show that I can make good. The spell I need you to do, I have something you can use to power it. Something to amp you up."

Condescendingly, "Nothing is that strong a power source, honey. Nothing but a—"

"Nemeton?" she interrupts, fingertips digging into her palm so she can keep her biting smirk and coolly cocked eyebrow. "I have one of those. In fact, I know exactly where one of the strongest nemeta in the Northern Hemisphere lies. It's right down the road."

Mercy cradles the talisman closely, her eyes burning. "I'd need something in return."

Backing away, Allison demands, "Think on it."

Whatever the witch equivocates for, she sees right through her. She'll take the bait. She won't be able to resist it. Not the lure of a nemeton. Of an invitation to Beacon Hills. She'll come. And it will cost the town greatly. Tapping into the nexus, using its power, _feeding_ it again, it will come at a high price. But she doesn't care. Once upon a time, it was her job to protect it, to guard it from power hungry abusers exactly like Mercy Madison. It was her calling. But every single soldier that stood beside her in that fight is dead. Every single person she has ever loved. They are all gone for the sake of defending that _thing_. That nexus of darkness and the supernatural. So she doesn't care anymore about protecting it. She cares about saving her people. She cares about getting home and restoring things to the way they should be. She'll get the witch. She'll get back.

* * *

_Her dad is dead._

_But first Cora dies. Cora dies and Stiles kisses her because he was panicked and scared of losing somebody else, losing his best friend, his person, and she gets that. She understands him. They don't talk about it. They don't pretend that it never happened, because the awareness that _he kissed her_ is always there, but they just don't bring it up. She knows he is still hung up on Lydia, and she doesn't mind that, and she meets Michael, and they start this thing that is normal and nice and everything her time with Derek wasn't. It doesn't run the risk of ruining the best relationship she has ever had, will ever have, by complicating a friendship, an essential vital anchor, with kissing and romantic shit while they are both headed in different directions, as far as their hearts go. Everything is sorta good. Sorta okay. But then she loses her mother, after he lost his father, and helps kill her own grandfather because he turns out to be murdering psychopath just like his psycho daughter, and Michael is dead because of her, because of them, and suddenly it isn't a risk to kiss and touch and lose themselves in each other because it is suddenly something they both desperately need, something without labels or defined lines. They fall into each other and never climb back out again. Never want to._

_Then her dad is dead. Just one more casualty in the war against the nemeton. And it breaks her. Breaks something important inside of her like killing Kate, like killing Gerard, like losing Michael or Mom or all the others didn't. Her dad is dead. Stiles is acting strangely, stuck in a waking nightmare that makes him do things that he would never do, say things he would never say, look at her like he is drowning and she is just standing on the shore watching him sink. A darkness and an open door inside his mind pulling him away from her. There are so few of them left standing. She failed her dad. Now she is failing Stiles. She fails everyone._

_There has to be something better than this. There has to be a light ahead._

_So when she gets thrown from a freighter into the ocean during a chaotic melee gunfire fight in a strife with a Korean cartel big into the supernatural collector's community, who abducted Isaac and Lydia to add to a bored rich man's collection of gifted freaks, she tries to keep swimming against the undercurrent tugging her down. Tries to keep fighting because that is of course the thing to do when you land in the middle of the Pacific at midnight with a storm brewing. You don't just let the strong overpowering whirlwind water take you away. You fight it. You kick and gasp and damn well swim. Which is what she does. Because she is Allison Argent. But all too quickly the water weighs her low. The world and the grief and the darkness swallow her whole. And suddenly she isn't sure anymore. Suddenly she doesn't have the energy or the drive or the resolve to keep swimming. To keep fighting. To keep breathing. So she stops. For just a second, just one fucking second, she gives up. She _stops_. Stops fighting and kicking and striving for the surface. Lets herself sink down into the dark abyss. Lets the violent crushing swell spin her where it will. The bottom of the ocean draws her in deeply. Just one second. And then everything changes. There is quiet. Relief. A peace. An ending. It seems not so scary or horrible anymore. It seems not so shameful or unforgivable to just _let go_._

In the arms of the ocean_, as the song goes. It's almost over then. Finally, finally, it can be over. This overwhelming relief comes over her. This numbness. And it feels … amazing. To go. To end it. She blacks out._

_It isn't defeat. It isn't betrayal. In this moment, it isn't anything but easy. Leaving your body. Losing your mind. Letting go of all that history dragging you down. Holding you here in this hell. This relentless fight. She isn't herself. For just a second, she isn't confined by the characteristics of Allison and her obligations. Allison would never abandon her friends like this, her family, leave them to fight on alone. Betray them like this. She would never. But in that one second, she does. She sinks. Until his arms lock around her. Until he drags her up again. Into the light. Drags her back to hell. He saves her. She didn't want to be saved, secretly and ashamedly, but she needed to be, so she holds onto him and pretends that just one second never happened. She holds onto him with all she's got in her left. Hopes like hell it'll be enough. It always has been before._

_This time, it isn't. This time is different. Because _never let me go_ turns to _I can't kill you_._

_Three weeks later, he is gone and a dark spirit that feeds on pain and chaos and strife is wearing his face. Using his voice, his hands, his intimate knowledge of everyone who loves him. Using it to understand how she is built. To take her apart, piece by piece. Torturing her. She almost wishes he'd left her in the water. Left her behind so the responsibility of this would fall to someone else._

_It's always her. Always her fight. Always her fault._

* * *

On their way back to northern California, a sign for town passes by when Lydia starts fiddling irritably with the radio dial. Frowning at the thing when she should be looking at the road. It isn't enough to make the brunette pick up her head, but she does open her eyes, forgets pretending to be asleep in favor of watching the redhead in mild disconcertion. She doesn't want to think about the witch or the spell or the world she might be going back to. She doesn't want to talk about her life or her alternate's life or the differences between their timelines. Doesn't want to get to know this Lydia like this Lydia seems stubbornly primly set on making happen. So she fake sleeps near the whole way back. Then her driver starts smacking at the radio and she can't ignore that.

"What is wrong with this thing?" her companion huffs.

Arms folded over her stomach, huddled into the side door, comforting scent from the flannel beneath her leather jacket making her ache and feel better all at the same time, Allison says flatly, "The radio isn't on, Lydia." Then shuts her eyes, going back to sleep, only not actual sleep.

But the voices are talking to her now and that won't be let go. "They're in trouble."

"The banshee thing. Great," she mutters, not opening her eyes, unalarmed by the worry in the other girl's voice, in the swerve of the car as she corners it unexpectedly, swinging them off onto a road they hadn't planned on taking. Her world's Lydia did this a lot too.

They find Scott, Isaac, Stiles, all being pummeled in one form or another by a brute of a wolf. He is swarthy and strong and obviously very angry. Probably a buddy of the mountain at Derek's she put down. The boys are cornered in a wide loading alley a few blocks over from the hospital. The girls pull over at the curb around the corner. Lydia jumps out and hurries. Allison heaves out a put-upon breath and pushes up. Follows after the familiar stranger. Knows that whatever she is telling herself, she will follow while she is here. She will have to follow so that she can protect her. And the situation she races into definitely looks like it needs some intervention.

Scott gets thrown into a wall so hard it caves in behind him as he hits the ground. As the girls round the corner, his body flying is all they see. She stops when Lydia stops, coming beside Stiles, who stands back a ways like the smart one he is, a little scuffed up but overall okay. Without any of the healing or the durability of the wolves, he knows not to go full frontal into a fight like that. But the scuffs say he is involved, and that bothers Allison, bothers her badly in a way that should _not_ bother her. Makes her angry. Protective. Possessive. It's all kinds of wrong.

Isaac is on the ground bleeding. Lydia rushes to Stiles's side in her panic and worry. Her hand catches his low between them. Allison waits a few steps behind her, off toward the other side from him and his split lip, his absorbed engrossed intensity of expression. She stands there still for just a moment, forgotten, unnoticed in the background, as the werewolves are picking themselves up off the ground, about to try again. But they got their asses handed to them in the first round so it isn't likely they'll do any better this time. And that anger is hot inside of her, simmering and faint but somehow burning hot and sharp like steel regardless, and so she doesn't wait to watch them. She takes those two steps up, aligned with Lydia and Stiles on Lydia's other side, handing her bag over to the redhead, who takes it distractedly, not looking away from the threat.

Calmly, almost boredly, strung tensely taut in control under the surface, she says, "Hold this." Then draws a dagger out as Lydia hugs it to her chest, draws the small blade and suddenly starts running forward, leaving the two humans blinking in uncomprehending surprise.

"Allison!" she hears Lydia protest in admonishing exasperation.

The hunter doesn't falter. Runs straight at the brute wolf past wide-eyed Isaac and grim Scott, gets near enough for him to take an arcing swing at her head before she flings herself downward without a hitch in her pace, dropping into a slide like a baseball player, letting cement scrape her skin raw along her side, skidding through the space of his legs, slicing the blade across his Achilles tendon as she turns, coming up again behind him all in one motion. It takes two seconds. Just two is all. On her feet, she fists fingers in his hair and yanks his head back before he can even collapse, halfway crashing down when she catches him, putting the weapon in front of him when she does, slitting his throat with a quick efficient slash. Entirely unsqueamish. _Unhesitating_. Two seconds. That's all. Because she has done this before. She has done this so often it is nothing but routine. Taking down opponents ten times bigger and stronger and meaner than she is. Only they aren't meaner anymore. Haven't been meaner than her in a very long time. She became the mean one. Became what she needed to be to survive. To protect her people. Her pack.

This time, unlike this morning in Derek's loft, a part of the back of her brain was aware that they would look at her the way they are looking at her now. Horrified. Wary. A little scared. She remembers the first time her Stiles, her Scott, her Isaac, her Lydia looked at her this way. It wasn't often or recent. Things changed. She adapted easier and sooner than the rest of them because of what she went through in that basement with Aunt Kate. But the looks didn't last long. They went away fast. Once the shock and reluctance faded. These people are different. The looks won't fade. They won't go away. These people will keep thinking of her as a killer, a cold vicious murderer in a way that makes it impossible for them to reconcile her with the Allison they knew, because they are _softer_ in this world. Everything is softer. Brighter. Less ruthless. And she tells herself that she doesn't care how they look at her. Or what they think of her. Because she isn't staying.

As the interloper drops, bleeding out almost instantly, she wipes the blade clean on her jeans and tucks it away into the waistband at the small of her back. Walking toward the group as they slowly unconsciously begin to gather closer, closing ranks, looking at her, staring at her. She only approaches instead of rotating around and leaving them there on the spot because she needs to retrieve her bag. If it wasn't for that, she would be gone already.

"You killed him," Scotts tells her, just in case she hadn't realized what she was doing.

"He was attacking you, wasn't he?" she retorts lightly, a challenging eyebrow quirked. Before, back at the loft earlier, she hadn't seen what their unnerved looks were for, hadn't got it that they are softer, less willing to do what needs to be done. Always looking for a soft solution. On the ride up to Ashland, she figured it out.

"Yeah, but—" He stops. Takes a breath. Rearranges his thoughts. Glances at Stiles for help.

Who picks up with, "Look, we just don't go around killing people if we don't have to."

Allison only shrugs, keeping her level stare locked with Scott's as she takes her bag back from the slightly stunned redhead, hooking it on her shoulder. She doesn't look Stiles in the eye when he speaks to her. She can't quite manage it right now. "If he didn't want to die, he shouldn't have started something he couldn't finish." And it is as simple as that. As straightforward as it sounds. The code she has lived by since sophomore year of high school. She tells them this and then she brushes gently past Lydia and walks off. Leaving them staring after her. Unsettled.

"She's very survival of the fittest, isn't she?" Isaac idly comments, eyes still on her back.

"She's scary," Lydia softly amends, feeling for the Alter-Allison and her origins.

"Dark and twisty," Stiles adds with a low voice, a false wry irreverence to his assertion.

"Definitely," Scott sighs, falling back against the nearest building.

And then also, "She stole my shirt." Which gets three heads swiveling towards Stiles.

* * *

TBC


	5. leave

.

**IF YOU MUST**

**leave**

* * *

Waiting. She is waiting for the witch at the nemeton in the dark. On her own. Always alone. Always on her own. Waiting. Pacing. Where the hell is this witch? They were supposed to meet an hour ago. To show her. An introduction. This was supposed to be the moment she would commit to working on this spell. Commit to getting Allison back where she belongs. And instead she has her waiting. She makes her _wait_. Allison isn't good at that. Allison isn't good at being so close for so long to the damned nemeton with nothing but waiting to distract her from the sickening draw it pulls at her core. The darkness pressing at her like a gaping black hole.

All of a sudden she gets woozy. Terribly woozy. She is on her fourth idle lap around the base when it hits. Sweeps over her like a nauseating wave. She pivots around, swinging fast away from the black hole abyss, stumbling to the edge of the clearing to escape its influence. She sways and nearly collapses, her knees buckling hard. She catches herself, palm slamming against the trunk of an oak tree, propping haphazardly half upright as her stomach revolts up into her throat and bile spews loose with wrecking violent force. Vomiting up her guts. Horrible horribly sick. Once it's all out and the upchuck reflex calms, she heaves and groans and swipes the back of her hand across her mouth. Haggard. Miserable.

Being in such extended proximity to the nexus must be affecting her.

"Shit," she sighs, pushing shakily away from the tree and tromping back towards the nemeton. She sways again, struggles to get a grip, to push aside the swell of sickness.

Where the hell is that witch?

"Looky what we got here," comes a rasping drawl from the south of her. "Another surprise." Lecherous overtones and a maliciously delighted grin. She turns to see a man enter the clearing. Two more off to either side of him and a ways behind. _Wolves_, she recognizes near immediately. More werewolves drawn to town by the pulsing beacon of a supernatural nexus of strong power. Usually not the friendly benevolent types. Like these guys. "This day is just full up on pretty little presents for us. Ain't it, Travis?"

"Ain't it indeed."

Three menacing interlopers. All twice her size. All amped by the unfair advantage of carrying supernatural strength. Yeah. She is totally not feeling up to this right now.

And yet… Well, no sense in procrastinating. She doesn't stop to try talking herself out of this. To confirm flat out what she already knows, which is that they aren't here for anything near good. That they are bad news. The tone. His taunt. Just the look of them tells her all she needs to know. She has been a hunter since she was fourteen. It's a gift. A sixth sense. An intuition practiced by experience and training and instinct. And she isn't going to feel less woozy in a minute or two as they surround her, swarming around her, closing in on her with slow predatory menace like only creeps do. There is a difference in that. Monsters and creeps. Not every monster is a creep. Not all creeps are the monsters. But these three are both, obviously, instantly, she knows that damn well. So no sense in procrastinating.

With a shrug and a sharp inhale, Allison pitches forward into motion. Sprinting the distance before they can react to realizing she isn't what she seems, isn't some helpless pretty young thing lost alone in the woods in the middle of the night. She leaps at one, at the closest, stepping onto his crooked knee when he braces in surprise to swing her other leg over his shoulders, like a girl on her father's shoulders, only not at all like that because she vices him there and throws herself immediately forward over his head, rolling quickly towards the ground, bringing him down hard in a rough flip. She tightens her legs around him, hand gripping her ankle for pressure, giving him a harsh jerk as they land. Breaks his neck. Half a second is all it takes. She unlocks her legs to give his heavy body a kick off and back handsprings out from under him and onto her feet to take on the remaining two when they rush her. But the wooziness gets worse from the sudden shift in her equilibrium from the tricky move and the flipping and vertigo hits her hard just as the blond with his rock hard bulk barrels into her from the left. He tackles her aside, bruising ribs, cracking them most likely, and the third man comes at her from the right even as they fall, so she can't evade his advance without giving into the other. She is on her back in the dirt with a brute on top of her but she gets the taser out of her pocket after a little struggling and manages to burn its metal prongs into the edge of his neck. He seizes, convulsing hard as the electric shock goes through him and he falls off to the side, so she is rolling the opposite way in the same heartbeat. Before she can get up off her hands and knees, however, a boot catches her hard in the side, a side already crushed from his friend's battering ram shoulder, and she is knocked flat onto her back again with a gasp. She can't breathe and her sternum screams and the vertigo has her head spinning and the woozy spell still has her wanting to puke and she just isn't fucking _up for this_.

"Get your ass up, Trav."

"She k-killed him!" Travis exclaims in return, still convulsing as he tries clambering upright off the ground where she left him. He is looking at their dead dominant buddy. "She killed him!"

"I can see that, moron. _Get up_ already," the other growls, driving another kick into her while she is stuck down. Before she can catch her breath, get any breath back into her body to be able to get up and kick their asses, or just stay alive, shock of the blow preventing her from remembering how to inhale, he bends and snatches her up by the hair, dragging her over towards the cut tree. She struggles to get her feet under her, twisting in his hold, letting him tear hair out, but he takes her by the nape of the neck and slams her head facefirst into the tree stump. She rebounds hard, smacking onto her back again, blood gushing into her eyes so she can't breathe _and_ she can't see. "Stupid bitch. We weren't gonna hurt you. But you just had to go and murder Mitch."

They go at her together. Batter at her. She tries to crawl through their kicks to her bag where she dropped it when she threw up. She doesn't get very far.

Before they can get farther, a bullet takes Travis in the head. Red hole right between the eyes. Stippling with silver. He drops heavy across her calves, leaving her trapped, wriggling free of him. The second shot rings out before his friend can even turn and find the shooter. He is still staring down at his dead counterpart when he falls. Two clean kills. Just that easy.

Pushing painstakingly upwards, palms digging into the dirt, Allison looks past their bodies to the edge of the clearing. Finds a fearsome stoic Chris Argent standing at the treeline, pistol raised, expression grim. She tries to say something to him. _Thanks_ or _you didn't have to do that_ or _you can go now_. Nothing comes out. She still can hardly breath, has to fight for each aching sip of oxygen, so she doesn't have the air to talk. Blood and sweat and tears of effort are still blurring her eyes as her chest rattles with each intake. She'll have bruises flowering on about every bodily surface soon and the pain will only deepen. Dull from this sharpness but not ease. Her arms and her collarbone plus her thighs and her knees and her back and a few places else like her right hip and her ribcage will all be mottled and sore and her muscles stiff and ripped. And this nausea. God, she needs to get away from this damned nemeton. Screw the witch. She'll find her another night.

But she can't move. It takes all her strength just to keep half her weight beneath her arms that shake with the strain of just that much. She won't be able to stand anytime soon. The energy just isn't there. So getting away from this damned thing is going to take some doing.

Or it would have if the older hunter hadn't tucked his gun away and strode across the gap to reach her. Without a word, he crouches down and shoves his arms underneath her, scooping her up off the ground with a smooth heft. Normally, she would never let this happen. She would say something to drive him away. Flinch from his proximity. From his determination. But he doesn't look at her. He doesn't speak. He just does what he does because it should be done. Doesn't stop to give her a choice. He just picks her up and carries her through the trees, moving through dark, bringing her back to the unpaved road off the highway that leads into the woods, bringing her to his waiting Humvee, its headlights shining their way.

The girl doesn't ask how he knew she would be here, doesn't ask why he came, because it was probably not her he was coming here for. Or maybe it was. Maybe one of his hunters called to tell him they spotted his dead daughter making the trek out to the nemeton on one of their patrols. This may not be her dad, but she'd bet he operates all but the same as the Chris Argent she knew, keeps patrols of the dangerous nexus almost night and day, alternating rotations of his hunters. Or maybe he doesn't have any hunters under him here. She hasn't seen any. If it were her dad in his position, he'd have had her staked out by his crew the second he knew she existed, and then she would have spotted the tail. But she hasn't. She hasn't seen anyone. Sometimes, there will be the odd glimpse of Derek or Scott and once Isaac crouched on a rooftop in the dark or lurking on another end of the block. Just checking in on the dead/not dead girl hanging around their town. But just them. Only them. And only occasionally. Either way, she doesn't care. It doesn't matter. So she doesn't ask. She doesn't wonder. She lets him set her down in the passenger seat. Lets him just drive. The silence doesn't bother her. She is hurting too much to mind anything.

* * *

_Three weeks after he pulls her from the water and forces her to breathe again, Allison wakes up to find Stiles sitting at the edge of her bed. Just sitting creepily there in the dark, in the watery light of silver moon shining in from the warehouse window behind them, sitting with silence and stillness that immediately has her unnerved, his back to her and his eyes empty. She should be worried about finding him like this. Not scared. Not anxious. Worried. She can't explain why she feels her hunter instincts pricking up. Why she pushes cautiously upright under the sheets and is hesitant to move. To say his name. To startle him. But she does. She ignores the irrational instincts and calls for him. But he doesn't move. He doesn't acknowledge her at all._

"_What are you doing here?" she asks, pretending things are normal, reluctant to react like this has her freaked out. "Everything okay?"_

_Still nothing._

_So she slides slowly off the bed on her side, rounds to his with unsteady steps, one foot softly in front of the other. Realizing something is seriously wrong with him. Has been for awhile now. If she was being honest with herself, she knew it last week. Yesterday. She just didn't want to see it. To get right up and face it. Because she is afraid. Of so many things nowadays. But in this exact moment, she feels that familiar sense of losing him come fully to fruition. Like the rubber band has snapped. Nothing dramatic has happened. He is just sitting at the edge of her bed in the dark. His eyes empty. There isn't an event or an action that she can pinpoint to support what she knows. What she doesn't want to believe but can't ignore any longer._

"_Stiles?" she breathes out his name, wanting and broken and hopeful, pleading for him to tell her how wrong she is, to reassure away her paranoia with a teasing mildly goofy grin and one lazy quip. "Stiles, look at me." Firmer now, she lowers toward him. Tries to get through to him speaking calmly and strongly, kneeling in front of him, grasping his face in her hands, forcing the boy to focus on her. But when he does, when he slowly turns those empty eyes on her, those dark dead eyes that aren't at all anything like his eyes, she wishes she hadn't. She wishes she'd left him alone. "Stiles…"_

_Finally, his gaze moves to her face, meets her own. He cocks his head strangely. Watching her as if he has never seen her before. As if the sight of her does nothing for him. Except there is a lingering trace of curiosity beneath the emptiness. Faint and puzzling. Upsetting. His voice is oddly hollow in a way unlike anything close to sounding like Stiles when he asks, "Does it hurt?"_

_Not understanding this, but instinctually distraught inside, she whispers, "Everything hurts."_

_Those dead eyes gain a gleam as she says it. Coming back to life, back to her almost. But he isn't. Not really. Because he isn't right. Inside. He isn't right inside. Then again, neither is she. Nobody is. Not now. Not after everything. But this is different. He isn't himself. He isn't _right_. Yet she lets him lean down and kiss her anyway. She lets him pull her off the floor, drag her up onto his lap until her knees dig at the mattress and her thighs press against his hips, opening to let him fit between them, his fingers banding her arms, her hands still gripping his face. Lets him kiss her, breathing her all in, drinking her deep. Lets him pull her up against him and turn to press her down into the bed._

_She knows something is wrong. She shuts her instincts up and kisses him back. Kisses him hard. Clings to him for as long as she can manage._

* * *

The man is still stoic as he sits beside her in his dark office, leaving the lights off, going by just the little illumination of moon through the narrow window behind his desk as he cleans the blood from her face, cleans the cut in her hairline, at her brow where it gashes into the skin with jagged breaks of impact. He stays stoic and she keeps her gaze fixed on the wall. One arm is curved over her midsection, pinning the icepack he gave her to her damaged ribs, but her tingling fingers are scratching restlessly at the bruised shape of her side, sliding soft fingertips back and forth over it to keep the pain throbbing like a live thing. Faintly but still unpleasant. Plenty enough to give her something to focus on. Anything but this awkward quiet and the desperate hurting tension living between them here. Anything to help her ignore the childish urgent desire to connect to this man that isn't her father but wears his face, but looks like him, sounds like him, smells like him. She is weak and pathetic. She is nowhere near capable of being adult about this.

She is _terrified_.

And that makes her angry. Makes her cold and harsh. Because he is stoic. He is unfamiliar. Beneath the face and the voice and the scent and the feel of his hands on her, of that same gaze that is all her dad, he is a stranger. And she _hates_ it. Hates how much she wants to be his Allison. Like with Stiles, only worse. So much worse.

"It's hard for me too," he says, gruff voice sounding dragged out of him, sounding sternly like her father sounded whenever he was teaching her a lesson, pushing her to be what she should be. "To look at you. It's hard for me too."

Obviously she isn't as closed off as she thought she was. Isn't as unreadable to him as a girl he doesn't know should be. And she hears how hard this is for him, how against his instincts he goes to even say that much, so she tries. Despite herself, she tries. For him, for his familiar push at her, his challenge, she makes an effort. Manages after a struggling moment to turn her eyes aside and meet his own. It hurts. Strains the cracks in her glass insides. But it hurts him too. She sees that. Tries to keep that in mind to make her stronger. Make her considerate.

"I know you're not my daughter," he tells the girl while they stare at each other, each at a loss, both hard-pressed to not look away, not keep avoiding. "I know you're someone different."

"Good," she declares, swallowing thickly, maintaining the mask.

When she gets up to go, biting off a wince, her stilted body movements plenty telling enough, he rises from his chair and tosses the used gauze into the wastebasket. "Wait," he says lowly then, stopping her in the doorway, sickly yellow light from the hall casting over her. He crosses the desk and opens the locked armory armoire on the other side of the room. Lifts a bulky weapons case up onto the desktop and pops its latch. Standing aside, he raises the lid to reveal an all-equipped blue bow and quiver. A compound bow. Though the last one she used was a shiny red recurve with one hell of a kick, she remembers this one as well. It makes her fingertips curve where they grip wood on the doorjamb. Curve and bite. He doesn't notice the way she clutches at it, or the way her jaw shifts within a clench, because his eyes are on the case. His expression wavers from stoic toward a flickering like the ghost of haunted grief and back again. "I can't put this to good use." She gets it. He doesn't want her overpowered again. Outnumbered. He wants her armed with a superior skill so she doesn't get beaten down into the ground again. "You should hang onto it."

_She gets it_. But that doesn't make her capable of taking it. "I don't—" She has to stop herself. Has to try again with different words. Easier words. "I don't use that anymore."

Even the fact that he _tries_ to give her Allison's bow makes her heart hurt. Makes sobs clog up tight and harsh in her chest. Not for him or his pain or his grief at the loss of his daughter but just _for her_. For everything. Since she's selfish like that. Obviously. If she wasn't selfish, she wouldn't be in this situation in the first place. None of this would've happened.

This time when she tries to go again, she hesitates without a reason in the hall, not because he asks her to wait or follows after her, but because she can't just _leave_. Not yet. Hand lingering there on the doorframe, she angles around back to him, finds him still looking down at the weapon case but looks up when she turns. Softens her mask. Says quietly, "Thank you. For the assist."

He nods just once in acknowledgement. Accepting her gratitude, her blatant pitiful desire to give him more and her inability to do so, resigning to the small finite step they managed to take together here tonight. He nods, looks back down at his dead daughter's weapon, her signature, and Allison pulls away. She leaves.

* * *

"_No," she says. Flat out. Refusal. Then says his name. Says it again and again and again. "Stiles. Stiles!" Says it louder. Stronger. Harder. "You have to be in there somewhere. You can't leave me." But he can. He has. "You can't leave me. You have to be in there and you have to _fight_ this." But how do you fight yourself? How do you fight losing yourself? "Do you hear me, Stiles? You can't leave me. You son of a bitch. You can't leave!" she screams, beating at his chest, his shoulders, crying horribly, chokingly, caught intensely in her anger and panic and despair and hatred and fear and desperation, pounding against him as he holds her, pulling her back every time she tries to escape._

_It isn't him. That's clear now. That's obvious. That's _glaring_. It isn't anything like him. It's evil. It's a monster. A darkness. It's not Stiles. It's not._

_Impassive in the face of her assault, of her agony and fury and distress, he shoves her into a wall by the window. Moonlight shines inside across the shadowed loft. The empty loft. It's just the two of them now. The others don't know. They know he isn't him. They saw what he did. They don't know he came back though. They don't know he came back for her._

_Her heart hammers. Her teeth grind. Her eyes burn as tears streak her face._

"_Stiles, please."_

_One hand curved for her face, clutching her intimately, fingers tunneled in her hair, cold palm against her cheek. "Does it hurt?" he asks. Again. He asks, "Allison, does it hurt?"_

"_Fuck you," she snaps softly, vehemently, gritting teeth, baring teeth, voice breaking on a sob. She doesn't say more. She doesn't have to._

"_It does. I feel it. I feel how much it hurts," he confesses, looking shiny and drugged like an addict soaking up his greatest fix. "God, your pain. Your pain is exquisite. Excruciating." He is dripping wet from head to toe. The rain runs rivulets down the glass pane of the window at her back. The hushed lulling intensity of his voice as it wraps around her, coiling inside of her, a low whispery thickness in a tone she has never heard Stiles use. Insidious caressing gentle adoration that slaps her in the face. "I've never felt anything like it."_

"_Don't touch me," she says dully, not making a move to shove him off._

"_Aw, Ally. Don't be that way," he mocks, practically purring. That smile. That tilt of his head as those piercing gray eyes she loves so much gleam in the moonlight. He is so perversely beautiful that it kills her inside. So cruel that she can't look away. "Do you know how special you are, Allison? Have you any idea? Well, to _me_ at least." He pauses. Takes on a pitying slant. "As for Stiles… Well, not so much really."_

_She throws a punch before she can help herself. Knocks him aside._

_He turns his head back to look at her with blood smeared to his lip. Smiles that insidious smile. His joy and rich delight at her reactions. At her suffering. This is killing her. And he loves it. He eats it up. Pushes a hand low to her stomach, pushing her back against the wall, slamming her hard until she winces at the sharp impact. Resuming their position. Darker now. His edges exposed. "You love him so much. You love him so much you can't even stand it. But he never actually chose you, did he? You were just kind of thrown together by circumstance." Which is true. All true. But the way he says it makes her skin crawl. Makes every secret plaguing insecurity buried inside wriggle to the surface. "You're damaged goods, Allison. You'll never be the one he wanted." Mockingly pitying again he tips his head towards her, rainwater falling off his lips as they hover so close. "Poor thing. Poor Allison. You needed him, so he stuck around." His hand is flattened to her lower stomach, pressing painfully into the scarring that curves along her pelvis, digging in every thorn even more. "He did it for you. Because he is a _good person_, isn't he, _Allison_?"_

_She hates the way he says her name. She hates it. Wants to hurt him. But she can't because this is still _Stiles_. Even though it isn't._

"_Does it hurt?" he asks again, always asking. "To know that you will always love him more than he loves you? To know that the only one he ever chose was the banshee who wouldn't give him even the time of day? But not you. _Not you_, Allison. Never you." He traces knuckles across her cheekbone so sweetly she wants to scream. "Who would want you? You're a murderer. You're weak. You fail us every time we need you. You fail everyone around you. You're a waste." He leans in so close, so close, their breaths mingling. Almost a kiss. A cruelly tender falsely loving almost kiss. "Oh, it was so easy to take him over," he breathes. "He let me in. _He let me in_, Allison, because he didn't care. He didn't care about letting you go."_

"_Liar," she murmurs softly, meanly, lifting wet lashes, meeting his cold glinting eyes, bearing his hungry expression._

_He is whispering now. Whispering seductive cruelties against her cheeks. Against her temples. Against her lips. Devouring her. Devouring what she feels. He is so hungry. So heartless. He kisses the girl. Moves familiar soft lips that don't belong to him across her lush unresponsive mouth to its corner edge, up her cheek towards her ear, breathing heavily, affected deeply by what she gives him. What she is struggling to not give. Standing still as a statue beneath his attentions, straining to be cold and unfeeling and numb, striving to not let his words and his touch and his taunting nearness tear her apart because that is exactly what he wants, what he needs, feeding off of her utter despair. But she is failing. She is failing miserably. He knows just how to pull her strings._

_Perfectly._

"_So insecure," he tells her gently, compassionately, burying his nose in the curve of her throat, his lips speaking druggedly against her collarbone. "So unhappy, Ally." Almost like a sad singsong. "Poor little hunter's girl."_

"_You can't leave me," she pleads tiredly, less fiercely now, but not to him, not to this sick thing. "You can't leave me." Her head sets back against the wall. Her eyes are closed. Her fingers are furled painfully in the fabric of his shirt at his waist between them and his are shaping her column of neck. Beginning to squeeze, softly but insistently, until she can't breathe. It isn't a violent thing. The way he does it. It's not violent. It's as gentle as his kiss had been. And just as suffocating._

_She doesn't fight him. She doesn't move._

_Suddenly, without warning, a hit bashes into the back of his skull and he goes down at her feet, ripped away from her, knocked unconscious. She opens her eyes. Looks up to find Derek. Scott and Isaac stand tensely behind him. Stiles lies between them all. There are tears burning in her eyes as she looks at the alpha, meets his grim glowering gaze, registers a haunted hurt in his chilling anger. It is the sensation of defeat. Of knowing you have already lost._

* * *

Derek is hunched over the kitchen island when Isaac walks in. Studying something irrelevant. Something old and dusty that the beta has no interest in. "Go away, Isaac. I'm tired."

Isaac shrugs, heading for the fridge. "Then go up to bed."

"I can't."

"Why?"

Tightly, he explains, "Because I came home to find Allison Argent asleep in my bed."

"Like Goldilocks?" his uninvited guest lightly lilts, stealing a beer from said fridge.

The man pauses his reading. Glances up in irritation. "Those were bears."

"Whatever. Are you gonna kick her out?"

"Shouldn't I?"

"No. She doesn't wanna be at Stiles's. Or her dad's."

"So I have to have her here?" he growls lowly.

The boy is unconcerned. "Lydia will kick your ass if you throw her out on the street."

"Take her with you."

"I can't."

The guys fall silent here. Awkward quiet ensues. At the top of the spiral staircase, the girl in question climbs down a step or two then sinks to sit on its riser, hardly visible from this angle, wrapping her fingers around the iron of the snaking rail. She is stiff and sore and everything hurts. This kind of beating feels worse before it feels better. Three days in, her bruises are still black but soon will yellow. Her ribs are wrapped. She can barely move. Lying down is pain. Standing is pain. Sitting is pain. Sitting like _this_ is agony. But she is physically and mentally exhausted. The agony gives her stamina. Keeps her awake. The blackout thing doesn't go so well. She drops heavy and in pain into unconsciousness and the dragging affect of it makes her not want to let it happen again. Their voices woke her. Saved her from the aching happiness in her dreams.

"Sorry to be a bother," she says, alerting both with a soft interjection, not sarcastic or accusing or resentful, but not truly sincere either. Just something to say. No feeling to it.

"You're not," Isaac counters compassionately, quietly, even while Derek grumbles differently under his breath.

_Cranky werewolf_, Stiles used to call him. She likes that this one is the same. That he treats her like he treated everybody else in her world. It's easier than Lydia's stubborn investment or Stiles's confounded awkwardness. Because he can feel her eyes on his back, itching at his shoulder blades as she watches him, she makes him shove up from his stool with an irritable rumble of growl deep in his chest, a faint nearly inaudible vibration, leaving his tome behind. Grabbing his jacket while he passes the boy, he stalks out. Throws gruffly over his shoulder at the girl, "Don't be in my bed when I get back."

Allison doesn't say a word. Just lets him leave. He doesn't like her here, doesn't know what to do about her presence, and in typical Derek fashion is more aggressive about that than the others. But that doesn't bother her. That doesn't make her feel anything in particular. Which is why she came here to begin with. Why here is the easiest place to be. Better than the Argent apartment or the Stilinski house or the McCalls. It's where she is most unwanted and yet where she feels safest in this altered world. And since Isaac is the least pressured presence of this one, she doesn't chase him off when he puffs out a sigh, pulls his hands free of his pockets, and comes up the stairs to sit beside her, breaking an offbeat stretch of tension that echoes about the loft into something softer. He sits close and she doesn't feel an urgent need to escape. Offers politely, "How are things?"

The boy rubs at the nape of his neck. "Scott's kinda torn up about you being back."

"I'm not back," she casts down, softly but searingly. "I was never here."

"Yeah. I know. I just meant…"

"And you?" she inquires, knowing his trail off isn't going to pick up. "Are you torn up?"

Isaac takes a minute to think about that before he decides how to answer. "It took a long time to be able to say her name, you know? To be able to think about her. Having you here is strange." He looks sidelong at the girl, half expectant. "But I'm alright."

"I'm glad," she says, mildly meaning it. Her elbow is on her knee and her chin is on her palm. Her eyes are on the empty loft. On the wide window and skyline beyond.

"Scott will be too," he tries to assure, oddly considerate of her feelings. His voice quiet with its characteristically sedated quality. It quells the strain. The tension. She doesn't feel pressured to be someone she isn't by this boy. He is easy like her Isaac was easy. Besides the innate protectiveness he doesn't mean to inspire, he doesn't demand anything from her. Never has. She gives an absent nod but doesn't say anything else. Doesn't need to. So after a few moments of comfortable silence, he wonders idly, "Are you going to leave before Derek gets back?"

"Nah. I'll take the sofa though. That might lessen his bitching."

This earns her a grin, him laughing faintly. Then he stands. "I better get home."

"Take care." But she makes him pause at the bottom step, saying gently, "Hey, Isaac?"

He turns. Looks up at her with a light in his eyes. "Yeah?"

"There is this girl where I'm from. Her name is Ava." She doesn't know why she tells him this. She wants to give him something. "Lydia said you don't know her here, but maybe someday…"

His smile is halfhearted. Grateful. "Ava?"

"Yeah."

"Good to know."

She actually manages a slight smile for his own. "I probably shouldn't have told you."

"Probably not," he agrees, but neither regrets it. He gets halfway to the door before he stops. Turns back again. "Hey, Allison?"

"Yeah?" she mimics, amused by the parallel.

"I never got to say goodbye. To her. I never go to say goodbye to her," he admits, looking away as he retraces his steps one by one towards the stairs. "That was Scott's moment. She wanted it to be him. And that's okay and all. That's probably how it should've been. But I never got a goodbye. I never got—"

"Your one last kiss," she guesses soberly, standing up now. She is at the end of the iron spiral, reaching the next to final stair, one foot up on the higher tier, her hands falling softly on the rail, her stomach resting against its curve.

The boy stops with a few paces still between them, still looking up at her, his dreamy features turning to disappointment and embarrassment. "It's weird. I know. Yeah. Forget I said anything." That faint kicked puppy quality about him is eerily familiar. "Take care of yourself."

"Isaac," she says, catching him with her voice before he can turn again.

A clear tone. _Indulgent_. He rotates a little at the sound of it. Walks slowly to her those last few strides it takes to close the gap. Gazing up at her with that faint awe she remembers from her own timeline and its own version of sweet vulnerable Isaac. That crush of admiration and infatuation that he had in his eyes at the beginning for her. Stepping up onto the bottom stair until they are a hairsbreadth apart, a centimeter from flush, he leans in and brushes his lips hesitantly across hers. Careful about it. Very careful. He dusts soft black hair from her cheek and tucks it behind one ear, his fingertips ghosting over her skin, creating frissons of gentle sensation.

As he steps down again, watching her from under sandy hooded lashes, his blue eyes dilated, he says meaningfully, "Goodbye, Allison." Reverently. Like resolution. Then turns to leave.

Once he is gone, she rubs fingers against her tingling lips, smiling thoughtfully in his wake. Softly. A slowly blooming lightness of some indefinable emotion lessening the harsh burden ever weighing her down. Ever suffocating her in its darkness. And into the poignant silence of the loft, she whispers musingly, "Huh…" Because she hadn't thought she had it in her. Hadn't believed she was still capable of this. Of kindness. Generosity. She had thought that part of herself was gone. That she couldn't spare it anymore. It's a small thing. But it is a thing. To know that she can still be kind. Gracious. In some small insignificant way. For just a second, only a moment, it makes her feel better about herself. Or less awful. She can still be…

Abruptly, Allison is pitching off the stairs, flinging herself across the room, crashing hard into a counter, heaving her guts violently up into the kitchen sink. And _fuck_ if it isn't nasty.

_Not the nemeton then._

* * *

TBC


	6. with me

.

**IF YOU MUST_  
_**

**with me**

* * *

Positive. Holy fuck. _Positive_. This can't be right. This can't be real. She is standing at the sink in the bathroom of the loft where Derek tells her every morning for the first two weeks to get out and then forgets every other morning to tell her and then eventually by Wednesday of week three doesn't say a word at all when she gets up from the couch and runs to the bathroom to throw up or when she comes out haggard and sallow and instead of reminding her that she isn't welcome here he just hands her a drink. She is standing at the sink in the bathroom, in this cramped hole of a bathroom, this unpaneled unpainted windowless box of a room, and the flickering sickly glow from the fluorescent rod of light above the mirror is letting her read the sign that is coalescing on the stick in her unsteady hand. Positive. It says positive. Like the last eight tests had said positive. She went down to the drugstore three days ago. It took her until today to finally open the boxes. To finally use them. To read eight watery marker results and toss eight faulty sticks into the trash. This is the ninth. This is the last one. She won't do it again. She won't take another one. This is it. No more. This has to be it.

_I don't deserve this._

Hundred. She spent a hundred bucks buying this bag full of drugstore tests. She stole the cash out of Derek's wallet, sure, but that is still a hundred bucks. She isn't stupid. The signs were there. She isn't stupid, and if she hadn't been so stuck in denial, so preoccupied, so incapable of realizing what was happening to her own body because that was just too much unfair awfulness to ever be possible that it could actually be going on, she would've known a long time ago what was wrong. She probably did know. Somewhere inside, in the back of her head, a part of herself she doesn't talk to, she must've known. But it couldn't be ignored any longer. This is it. This is the end of her avoidance induced reprieve. This is the moment it becomes reality.

_I know what I've done. I know I've hurt people. But I didn't mean to. I was trying to help._

Swelled with a low muted pain, a quiet shock and hurt and rage of disbelief, she sucks a sharp breath in, shuddering with its intake, standing in dazed stillness for the last hour or so. But here is where it breaks. Where the calm shatters and the storm takes over, shuddering viciously through her body, a squeezing suffocating pain in her chest, and she shoves out that shaky breath with a harsh jagged burst of expulsion. Throws the test against the wall with a visceral screaming sound that isn't quite anything as distinct as an actual scream. It cracks as it hits. Slams her hands down against the porcelain edge of the bathroom sink over and over and over for a second, struggling to get control of this wave, of this latest assault of punishing crushing emotion overwhelming her. When her palms her bruised and aching and a little bloody, she pulls back and drops to the floor, drops into a crouch, her knees digging into her chest, her heels arched off the tile, elbows against her kneecaps, raw hands finding her head as she hangs it, buries it down, fingers tunneling black hair so tightly it tugs at the scalp.

_This can't be happening. This can't be happening. This isn't fair._

Paroxysm. A _paroxysm_. That's what this is. She isn't all the way as crazy as she seems. As she _feels_ sometimes. She has just had a lot of shit to cope with, you know? She isn't well. In the head. She knows she hasn't been well for awhile now. Who would be? But it is what it is. And this new unbearable thing is just another thing. It is what it is. _It is what it is_. She can get a handle on this. She has to. She can't stay clenched up in a huddle on the bathroom floor forever. Screaming in her head because screaming out loud just isn't enough. The quiet makes it worse. Makes it harder to find herself again, find her center, her numbness. _Control_. She needs control.

"I need. To breathe." She shuts her eyes. Regulates. "Breathe, Allison. Just breathe."

_What did I do? What did I do to deserve this life? To deserve all of this? Am I really so bad?_

Almost in a cold state, she unclenches her fingers from her hair and pushes at the edge of sink to fall backwards onto her ass against the tile, her back against the clawfoot tub. Locks her ankles, knees still pressing at her chest, and wraps one arm around her shins in a hug. Keeping herself in a semblance of togetherness. Staples and glue. Her other hand digs into the pocket of her hoodie, pulls out her burner cell, a clumsy thumb keying in a number, calling the witch. She needs to grab onto something. She needs something to hold onto. She needs hope. Purpose. The witch can give her that. The witch is her purpose.

"What's taking so long?" she snaps as soon as the ringing stops, her voice sounding odd even to her own ears, husky and tremulous in an unusual way. Not about to cry, but not normal either. "I need this done now."

"It isn't some cheap magic trick. It takes time to prepare for something this big. I'm still just sorting through the information you gave me about the last one. Trying to figure out what went wrong on their end so I don't do exactly the same thing." The witch isn't pleased. Isn't indulgent or intimidated. She is irritated. Uppity. Which pisses the girl off. "Have patience, hunter."

When she hangs up midway through her next protest, Allison accidentally clenches her fist, accidentally cracks the cheap plastic phone in half. She opens her sore fingers, lets the pieces slip from her grasp to clatter to the tile, her eyes fixed on the shaking of her pale hand. Thinking that maybe this isn't real after all. Maybe, just maybe, everything is all a dream. None of this happened outside her head. She went crazy. She is in a dark padded room in Echo House. Roommates with crazy Lydia and the voices in her head. Derek is at home watching out for the boys, making sure they don't get into too much trouble, and Stiles comes to visit every afternoon. Or maybe she was from this place all along. Maybe she _is_ their Allison. But she went crazy, and she dreamed up this horrible wonderful nightmare of another life, a parallel universe where everyone is dead and her boyfriend's best friend is in love with her and makes her happy and it is them against the world, where in reality she is just deluded and pathetic and hallucinating and he wants nothing to do with whackjob Allison Argent.

Funny thing is, she doesn't know which one she wants. She would take either.

Maybe it is a false positive. She has to say that. In her head, she has to tell herself that because that is the only sane thing to think. Maybe it is nine false positives. Maybe she miscarried already. Maybe she lost it from the beating by the nemeton and this is just lingering chemicals in her body turning the tests positive. That could be it. This could be a mistake. It has to be a mistake, right? It should be impossible. She shouldn't be capable of any of this. Even doctors and science concur. This should never have happened to her. And definitely not now. Not here. Stiles is dead and she is trapped in somebody else's universe. This is not the time for miracles of science. For sick jokes from the aether. Yes. There has to be some kind of misunderstanding going on.

Using the tub for leverage, Allison picks herself up painstakingly off the bathroom floor and leans forward, catching the edge of the sink again, using it for support. She looks up at the mirror in front of her. Looking at herself under flickering fluorescents. There is a long moment of calm, of her being okay, of being in control again, but then the reflection wavers and she is backsliding. Snaps her fist into the glass before she can stop it, before she even realizes she jolts, her knuckles bloody and embedded in broken shards. Drops of red splatter on the white of the sink basin with a brief rain of clinking pieces of shattered glass. Of a ruined mirror.

The girl doesn't feel the pain. Doesn't feel the wetness of blood making tracks across her hand like veins or spiderwebs or rainfall trailing down a window. She doesn't feel anything. And that is a good thing. That is good. If she isn't feeling anything, she isn't feeling the crush. She lets go of the sink and takes in another breath, calmer this time, less harsh, less frenetic. She turns to take ahold of the doorknob, letting herself out of the hole, out into the daylight. She needs air now is what she needs. She needs perspective. Because this can't be happening. It just can't.

There is only so much she can take.

* * *

_The beeping is the first thing she becomes aware of as unconsciousness fades and the hot ache running through her returns. The ache of being alive. Of having survived. Fevered chills. Weight hot and heavy sitting on her chest. Healing. That is the feeling. Her body is healing. Slow and painfully. She wakes up in the hospital, not for the first time, not surprised by her surroundings, and finds that it is the middle of the night and the place is deserted, but she is not alone. Which is what surprises. She is hooked up to machines and being pumped full of fluids and monitored closely as she recovers from surgery. She is in the ICU. Five days in the ICU is a bad sign. Means it could still go either way. But she isn't worried. She isn't scared. She knows she'll be fine. She was saved. The hard part is over. It's over. She just has to keep telling herself that until it feels like the truth._

_All she can remember is killing Kate. Stiles pulling her out from under her aunt's dead body and cradling her in his lap as he yelled for help. The fear and desperation in his voice. That panic. She felt none of that. She heard it in his voice and remembers wanting to reassure him, but she wasn't afraid or desperate or panicked by then, and she didn't have the energy to expend to talk. So she just laid in his arms, let him tug her against him, sprawled limply there, blood seeping outward in a circle that was ever growing. She stared at the way her limp hand hit the concrete, at the way it wouldn't move. If anything would settle sickening dread inside her, it would be that sight. Strangely._

_But she didn't die. He found her. Of all people._

_And now here he is again. The room is dark. The halls beyond it are empty. The boy is slumped in a chair at her bedside. Not exactly at her bedside, not right up against it, because he has it pushed to the window looking out at the hall, a cheek propped in his hand, his thick lashes lowered, face slack. Just like that night, she can't figure out what he is doing here. They don't actually know each other. The only time they come into contact is through somebody else. One of the others in their odd circle. She doesn't have anything against him, but she doesn't know him, and he doesn't know her. So why it was him who came for her, who managed to find her, who saved her, and why it is him again now passed out in her hospital room, she can't figure it out._

_"What are you doing here?" she asks, low and quiet but not soft, not particularly anything._

_He picks his head up, jolting clumsily from his slump with a start, as if caught sleeping in class. Throwing disoriented looks around the room, he rights himself in his seat and tries to act normal. "Your dad had to go do something."_

_Of course he did. But that doesn't help her understand. "And you're_…_"_

_"Oh, you know." He ruffles fingers into his hair at the back of his head. "Just chilling."_

_She doesn't have a response to that. Just blinks at him. Making him shift uncomfortably. She is not up for company. For being human yet. She doesn't try to put him at ease. But she does tell him, "Thank you." Then softly after a beat, "For saving me."_

_Stiles sobers. Almost seems darkly. Haunted. "I didn't save you." Near unnecessarily apologetic. "You did that yourself. I was way too late."_

_Right. Too late. Somebody found her when she never thought they would, but it was way too late to make a difference. He saved her life, but it wasn't enough. Part of her thinks it might have been a better thing to have let her bleed out on the concrete. Because now she isn't who she was last week. She isn't really Allison anymore. She left pieces of her down there in that basement with Aunt Kate. Important pieces._

_"You can go now." She doesn't have it in her right now to not be rude. "You don't have to stay."_

_The boy sinks deeper into the chair. Gives a nonchalant shrug. "I'll stay."_

_"Stilinski—"_

_"No, really." When he cuts her off, it is quiet and casual, but there some underlying firmness to his decision, to his resolve. "It's a slow night. Ain't got nothing better to do." Then after a moment, almost so faint she misses it, "You shouldn't be alone."_

_For some reason, hearing this bothers her. Upsets her in a way she hasn't been capable of feeling since she first woke up in a hospital and not a basement and felt shock. "I don't mind."_

_Braver now since his first furtive assertion, he insists, "I don't want you to be alone."_

_The bother becomes reluctant conflicted comfort. Glad for it, she murmurs, "Alright."_

_Awkwardly, he asks, "Um, so_…_ Do you want me to hold your hand or something?"_

_Allison hardens. "No."_

_"Okay, yeah, sure," he rushes, nodding his head in agreement. "That'd probably be weird."_

_And suddenly the newly broken girl has the strangest urge to smile. She doesn't actually smile, but the urge alone gives her a bit of hope, like maybe it isn't only her body that is healing. Maybe she hasn't changed as much as she thought she had. Maybe there is still some Allison left. Or maybe it is just the effect of this strange teenager beside her. Whatever it is, having him here at least lets her be distracted from the yawning emptiness inside. The gaping black chasm. As if she stands on the edge of a cliff, of jagged dark rock looking over the black nothingness of distance stretched between this side of the other side, that side she wants to get back to, where everything was still easy. And bright. But all she has is this edge, all the black beneath, and the dark stormy sky above. But the boy stays. He sits in his chair under the window a few feet away, staring at the wall, acting awkwardly anxious. And she can forget that mental image in her head haunting her. She can stay in this hospital room with its dull white walls and quiet hum._

Highly unlikely_. That's the words they used. Highly unlikely. Which means a thirteen percent chance that she will ever bear children. Which is weird. She is fifteen. She hadn't ever thought about bearing children. About being a mom. Because she is fifteen. But that seems like it would make it all that much worse. Except she can't tell if it does or not. She hasn't processed that yet. She hasn't even processed her days in that basement yet. Not the squelch of sound when she ripped the dagger out of her own gut or the sickening crunch as she drove it home into her aunt's throat. Again in her chest. Six days later. Six days. That's how long it was. That's what they tell her. It took her six days to get the guts to do what needed to be done. She'll never let that happen again. She'll never wait._

_The girl is half asleep, almost all the way gone, when she feels his skin touch hers, feels him take her hand where it's lying at her side anyway, despite her harsh _no_. Take it tentatively, but then clasp it tight in his own, gripping strongly. She doesn't open her eyes. She doesn't tell him off or pull away. She doesn't stir at all. She only keeps drifting down, feeling safe, feeling better._

* * *

Allison is itching for a fight. Jonesing for violence. Anything to distract her from her problems. From reality. That kick of adrenaline, of vicious focus, it is all she wants. All she needs. So though she typically keeps those feelings restrained unless necessary to unleash them, she isn't inclined to pass up the excuse when an inkling of possible justification crosses her path. When her walk brings her around the brick of a building into the sight of a parking lot where a group of monsters are gathered about a red Maserati with the top down. Five guys. One girl. Loud and obnoxious as they drink and smoke and joke, roughhousing with offhanded harshness, making trouble for the occasional passersby. She slows her pace as she spots them, observing casually from a distance, doesn't need the flash of yellow eyes the ringleader gleams down at the blonde when he grabs her by the hips and yanks her off course into him where he leans against the hood, his ankles crossed, to recognize unwanted werewolves. She knows rogues when she sees them. And they could prove the perfect outlet for her stress. _Validation_. Finally.

Ignoring the reasonable person in her head telling her this is not a good idea, she steadies her pace across the lot. Reaches for the blade at her back beneath her jacket when a hand clamps over her mouth out of nowhere and she is dragged backward past the last corner, knocking hard into a chest behind her as he puts his back against the brick. The only reason she doesn't fight before he can get her there is because she knows that touch. Knows the feel of his body pressed behind her, however innocently at the moment. However incidentally.

"Shh! _Shh_!" he hushes urgently as he pulls her, as if she'd scream. Once they are out of sight, propped flush to the wall, Stiles breathes insistently into her ear, "Don't do it."

They watch, frozen together there, as the car swerves out of the lot at breakneck speed with all six piled in, letting out catcall yells and tossing beer bottles out the convertible top. She doesn't try to shake him off. Doesn't pursue them. They aren't worth that effort. It was a fleeting impulse anyway. But she does feel a stab of disappointment, of resentment for the interference, restless in her loss at what to do, pressure pricking like a thousand needles from under her skin. The feel of his arms forgetfully curved around her makes her keep still. Makes her long ridiculously for a hug. She doesn't want him to let go. She just wants to stay like this. Just to pretend. For a little while. But she isn't pathetic enough to give into the feeling.

_I don't know you. I don't know you. I don't know you._ She needs to remember that.

When he realizes their inadvertently intimate position, he rushes to release his hold on her. She doesn't immediately jump away, whatever her resolve. Just stands there leant against him for a second or so. Collecting herself. Breathing. To ignore his nerves and discomfort of the situation, of her hesitation, he says shakily, breath ghosting her hair, "You really can't just go around killing anybody that rubs you wrong. That's not how we do things here."

"I wasn't—"

"Yes, you were."

The girl steps ahead then, angling around to face him finally, a strange expression on her face, an odd atmosphere about her. "Fine. Maybe I was."

He tells her, "They're a pain in the ass, okay? But they're just passing through."

"Okay," is all she says, staring at him, completely flatly, making him shift. After a minute or so stuck on that awkwardness, that uncertainty, she asks a soft question, and sees plainly on his face how it takes him aback. "What was she like? The Allison you knew."

Obviously he never expected her to ask. She made it clear time and again that there are things unsafe to mention in her presence. But she is staring at him still, her expression expectant, and he has to say something. "Uh, well… You know."

"No. I don't know."

God, she just won't give him a break. "She was smart," he answers, on a whim, not wanting to talk about Allison, not able to think of the words because of that resistance, and yet it slips out as he opens his mouth. "And kind." And once it's out there, out loud, he finds that the rest comes a lot easier. "And had a really good laugh." He has put the image of that girl out of his mind for so long now, forcing himself to not think about her, even as she tormented his sleep, that it surprises him how good it feels to be talking about her like this. It's not a straightforward good. It aches in that familiar guilty way he carries with him all the time now. "Sometimes she was just as scared of all the monsters as I was, but she never let it stop her. She always pulled through." There's a relief. That's where the good comes from, he realizes. He's been so busy being haunted by what a demon using his body had done, he forgot to mourn her for himself, like his friends got to do. He forgot to _miss her_ on his own behalf. "I mean, I'm not saying that there wasn't a time after her mom died where she went kinda psycho crazy with revenge and did a couple things that she really regretted, but normally she was always the one saving all our asses."

"She sounds like a good person."

"She was," he insists, nodding strongly, his face clouded. Quietly, "She was a hero."

After the first few words, he shoves his hands into his coat pockets and pushes off the building to start walking. The girl moves alongside him, listening to him muse, falling absently into sync as they head for the road by the woods, afternoon sunlight filtering the autumn colors. Once the two get past the initial wariness, and the inherent stiltedness that comes with it, being alone together becomes almost easy, preoccupied as they both are with their own thoughts. Peaceful.

Following his lead, she clarifies, "You weren't close."

"Not really, no. Not as close as each of us were with some of the others." His step hitches then, hesitating just a split second, nearly imperceptibly, and he glances sideways at her, finds her eyes on their feet, her hands hanging by her thighs. "First she was just the new girl my best friend had a raging crush on. Then she was the _epic soulmate_ of my best friend. Me and her got to be friends a little later ourselves. Then she went from an epic soulmate to just a first love. But it wasn't like it left a wedge or anything. Not really. So we weren't close, but we liked each other. We trusted each other with our lives, so we kinda had to be close in a way, right? I mean, she risked her life to save mine more than once. I'm just saying it wasn't like we were besties or anything. We were just part of something bigger."

"And you never threw yourself on top of her to keep her safe?" she counters liltedly, not quite believing it, because he is too much like the Stiles she knew to not have done that at least once in his life. Hers had done it a thousand times. However much it pissed her off, needing to be the one to keep _him_ safe, not the other way around, mistakenly seeing him as more fragile than the rest of them for the longest time, it was always just a reflex for him to grab hold of her amidst the chaos. Cover her. The idea that her counterpart was the only one doing any protecting between them is a little implausible. And she tells him this with her faintly amused arch look.

"I might've. Once or twice. Mostly it was Allison rescuing me. Rescuing all of us. She was good like that. Allison could—" He tapers off thoughtfully, awkwardly, glancing sidelong at her again. "It's really weird. Okay, a lot weird. Like massive amounts of weird. The whole _different Allisons_ situation is seriously confusing. How about we just call you Ally? That way we know when we're talking about—"

"No."

"Oka-a-ay. Not the right nickname for you. I get it. But—"

"No," she says again, sharper this time, cutting him off, dismissing the subject. She is sharply opposed to anything remotely _Ally_ like coming out of his mouth ever again. This once was enough to leave her bothered for days. Leave her aching and itching. Wanting to hit her fist into another plate of glass. So she stops where they stand, stopping him too, angles toward him. Gives the boy her scary hunter look. She doesn't want to hear _that_. Stiles is the only one in the world who ever called her Ally. Her Stiles. She couldn't stomach it coming from this one.

He fears for his life off that look. So he crosses the ability to say Ally off his brain list of things he is physically capable of. Because he has a healthy fear of Allison Argent. Any version of her. "Right. Just Allison. Only ever Allison. I'll tell the guys."

"Thank you," she forces out, forcing her sudden harshness to smooth as best she can, to soften back towards that intangible easiness they had somehow found themselves in only moments ago. "I'd appreciate that."

"No problem." But he is wary again, returned to painfully tense, and it makes her regret being so quick to go hard. "So what was _he_ like? The other me. Can I ask?"

Trying to get past the moment. She appreciates that too. Gives him a faintly grateful smile. Answering isn't as easy. She struggles with it. "He… Like you, I guess." They lapse again into quiet. Walk a ways without talking. Then she is driven, by his patience, his willingness to not push her, to say more. "He knew better of who he was. Steadier on his own feet most days."

Stiles tips his head, looking sideways again. He asks, "What makes you think I'm unsteady?"

"You're not sure about yourself yet," she assesses casually, casting her focus across the ground, across the trees, scanning their surroundings. Distractedly declares, "That's alright. You are only getting started. You'll get there."

"You're a very odd person," he tells her, out of the blue, forgetting his filter. He is watching her watch the world around them. Studying her. Struggling to figure her out. She makes no sense. Her behavior. Her reactions. As soon as he thinks he knows what to expect, she changes tactics in a swift mood swing of unexpected response. He is braced for hard and gets soft instead, ready for brusque dismissal when she pulls him in with questions, seemingly seeking for company. She lulls him with the softness and whips around spitting spikes. The girl is unfathomable. Possibly insane. Hardly anything at all like what her familiar face tries to convince them of.

Shifting course, she turns in front of him, blocking his path as she tilts her head and inquires, "Are you a virgin?" Just like that.

"Wha—" He trips over his own feet to stop before they collide, but she doesn't flinch or ease backward to maintain herself, only lets him correct and then stand blinking uncomprehendingly. She doesn't reiterate. Doesn't hurry him. Just waits. And finally, sure enough, he finds his tongue. "Uh, no? I mean, not anymore?" And at her quirked eyebrow, "No. Not a virgin."

Mildly curious, not concerned with assuaging his wary nervousness, she wants to know next, "Who was it? Your first time. Who was it with?"

"Um. I—" He looks around. Searching futilely for backup. Finds himself spilling forth a reply. "Well, I was in Echo House awhile back. And there was this girl. A werecoyote."

"Malia Hale?"

"Yeah. Yeah, Malia. That's her. That's the one."

"That's weird," she says simply, spinning around to resume walking.

It takes him a minute of staring at her back before he snaps into movement and follows on. "What?" he protests, catching up to her shoulder. "Why is _that_ weird?"

Not slowing, she wings her brow. "Derek's cousin. Peter's daughter. Weird."

He falters again. Watches her walk. "Wha— Well." Can't really argue with that. So he shoves forward again, catching up to keep at her side again, asking evenly, "Who was yours?"

"Derek."

"_Ack_!" he reacts, shuddering with a vivid grimace. Then less theatrically, "Ew. Gross."

Allison scrunches her face in a skeptical frown. "Gross? Why is that gross?"

"It's _Derek_. And you're _you_." Like that should explain it. "That's the weird one. Not mine."

"Maybe." Which is all she says, paired with an unbothered shrug. Lydia reacted similarly at the allusion to her and Derek being a thing. Warned her not to mention it. She guesses it is almost as foreign a conclusion as her and Stiles in this world. Which she doesn't understand. Why is it such a hard idea to grasp? That either of them could ever love Allison. Would ever be attracted to her. She is vaguely insulted, faintly wounded by their repulsion to the very suggestion, and just a little amused on the surface.

Past a lull of thinking silence, walking along together, he ventures reluctantly, "The other me. Who was his with?"

"I was," she answers, after a deafening hesitation. Adding quietly, "I was his only."

"Oh," is all he can think to say. Then, "That's… That's cool." And at her arch sidelong glance, he has to amend, "Kinda romantic."

"Romantic?" she echoes, letting out a soft humorless laugh. "No. It's not romantic. It's sad is what it is. He should've had lots. He should've had time."

Stiles stops walking. Slowing to a gradual halt at her words. At the muted sadness in her voice. The detached quality of almost faded devastation. She gets ahead of him a ways before his halting sober question turns her around. "Would there have been?" When she rotates, when she meets his gaze, he has to swallow. Has to inhale before he goes on. "Others. If he had more time, I mean, do you think he would've wanted anyone else?" He doesn't know why he's asking her this. Doesn't know why he wants to know. But he does.

"I don't know. I don't—" The quiet sedated cadence cuts off and she looks away, compressing her lips, schooling away the sudden waver of her features. She is so pale. So pretty. She seems sick almost and he feels guilty for causing her pain. "He said that he wouldn't. He said a lot of things." She sounds soft now. Not about to break. "But he should've had time to change his mind."

Trying to make her feel better, to make up for hurting her, with his questions and his face and just not being the Stiles she needs, but not knowing what to say to do that, he ends up admitting, "I wish I had that."

"More time?" she questions incredulously.

He shakes his head. "That kind of epic all-consuming connection to someone. That purpose." When her expression wavers again, like fighting off crying, when looking away isn't enough and she has to actually turn her whole body around to get away from his eyes, to maintain composure, he shuffles his feet, feeling inadequate, raking fingers through his hair with a sigh. Tries to take a step her direction but changes his mind and backpedals. Horribly helpless.

It takes a few very long moments, very uncomfortably deafening moments, but she suppresses the looming breakdown and turns toward him again, explaining thickly, "When you go through a something so intense with someone, it feels like they are the only person in the world who could ever understand. Because they were the only one who saw you at your lowest point. The darkness. Go through enough somethings with that same someone and it starts feeling like you really can't live without them. It feels like nobody else could ever be what that person is to you." She pauses, catching her bottom lip with her teeth, gaze skating away from his searing stare, enraptured in a sympathetic somber way by her words. "Sometimes that bond is your salvation. Sometimes you're good for each other. Other times, it doesn't turn out that way."

"Which one were you?"

"You know which one we were."

"Yeah," he says slowly, stuck on her level gaze, "I guess I do."

"Did Lydia tell you how it ended?"

"Lydia won't tell me anything."

"Please don't ask her. I don't want you to know."

"Okay," he says, still stuck.

"Okay," she says, still stuck too.

Then he sighs, eyes wandering low because he can't hold up under her penetrating pressure, just now noticing the wrecked mess of her hand. Taking those steps across the gap he couldn't a couple minutes ago, Stiles grabs gingerly at her wrist before the impulse can pass. Pulls it up and examines the injury. "Jeez…" Her knuckles are raw and ripped, blood speckled across them with diamonds of glass in the pale skin, flesh torn. "We gotta do something about this."

"I was going to the hospital anyway," she tells him, gesturing in the direction they've headed. "Hoping to find Melissa."

"For this?" he checks, looking up under thick lashes, finding that hard to believe.

"For something else."

Forcing his eyes back down to her hand before she looks up and their gazes lock and get stuck staring again, he licks his lips, shakily tells her, "Scott's mom knows about you, but we'd better go in the back way. I'll get her for you." Realizing he is still holding her wrist, he lets go of her quick. Puts his arms down. Keeps his hands to himself. "If anybody there recognizes you—"

"Is that likely?"

"Well, our Allison spent a lot of time at the hospital. So yeah. Probably."

"Alright. I'd appreciate that." She has to drag it out and it tastes unnatural on her tongue but she forces herself through the reluctance. The need to be away from him because the need to be near him despite the hurt it causes is so suffocatingly overwhelming. So crushing. She almost just can't stand it. Except she can. She can stand it because here she is, standing it, and the alternative is a worse hurt. "I'd really appreciate that."

* * *

_"Stiles? Is it really you?" Lydia asks, bending down in front of the chair they have him tied to. Tears leak from his raw eyes, reaching the tape across his mouth. He nods at her, looking pained. Orange sunset rays burn in from the living room windows behind him. That is all it takes. Nod and a few tears. Because she wasn't there. She didn't see what he did. Didn't see what this thing is like with her own eyes. So she takes the tape off his mouth and starts untying him, rushed with relief, upset at the whole situation, not quite able to believe Derek and Scott and Isaac and Allison when they tried to explain what was going on, what had happened, and then were all stupid enough to leave Lydia alone with him. Only they weren't. Allison was supposed to be there. But his eyes. Looking at her. The way he was looking at her, laughing at her inside, cutting her deep. She just needed a break. Needed a breath. She was only gone for a minute. Gone into the kitchen to clutch the countertop and hyperventilate for a second. To drink a glass of water and push back the hurt and hysteria and those suicidal urges. She was only gone for a minute. But it was enough. It was too much. And so Lydia is on her knees, loosening the ropes from his ankles, moving up to his wrists where they are bound to the wood arms of the chair, saying wetly, "God, I knew you couldn't really be lost."_

_"Lydia, no!" she screams, coming around the corner from the kitchen in the McCall house just as her friend gets his second wrist undone. But it is too late. It is way too late._

_With a victorious smirk, Stiles surges to his feet, slamming the redhead down facefirst into the hard wooden edge of the chair, knocking her out. Allison is running the second she sees his ropes come loose but he is too fast. Quicksilver. He spins at the last second. She should've slowed down. She should've used her head. Instead she rushed and she gets met with a blade shoved into her side. Her own knife. She panicked. She got emotional. She got stupid. She _screwed up_. He holds the back of her head, keeping her up as her knees give out, keeping her against him as he twists the dagger in. She gasps, jerking with the gutting impact, fingers clutching at his shoulder, at his own side as she struggles to push past the pained shock. To breathe. To not die._

_"Poor little hunter's girl," he murmurs coaxingly, hauntingly, his head tilted, looking at her with dark pitying eyes, some twisted perverse form of love or kindness. It hurts so much worse than hate. Fingers in her hair, cradling her head, he brings her close and softly kisses her mouth before she slips off the knife to the floor. Blood on his hand, on the steel he still grips, it is the very last thing she sees before her eyes blur. She is sprawled helpless on her back. Clutching her bleeding stomach. Choking. Shuddering from the strain of trying to take in air._

_Through the blur, she watches him drop the dagger and turn away from her, watches him latch onto Lydia's arm, watches him drag her from the house. Tries to get up and follow. Tries and fails. Tries again. Fails again. She can't move. She can't get up. Blood all over her pale hands, shaking bad, she manages to drag herself across the room, crawling for the dining table, snatching at the hem of the tablecloth, pulling it down onto her as she collapses from the reach. Candlesticks and a plate and a bowl of fake fruit all clatter on top of her, along with her phone, which she fumbles open, dialing in clumsy bloody pushes. She calls Derek. She needs Derek. But she is slipping. She can't talk. She must pass out, because the next thing she knows, he is there, he is running towards her, dropping near her to prop her up and check her out._

_"Allison? Allison, what happened?"_

_"He took her. The nogitsune. He took Lydia. We have to—"_

_"I have to get you to the hospital," he interrupts, pressing her down when she tries to push up off the supporting hand between her shoulder blades._

_"I'm fine. It's fine. It hurts. It hurts _a lot_. Probably a good sign," she slurs, struggling to stay clear against the weight of unconscious bearing down. "I don't think it hit anything important."_

_Derek growls lowly, applying pressure. "You're losing too much blood."_

_But she shakes her head. She fights. "We have to find them, Derek."_

_"We will. She'll be alright. We'll find them." Ignoring her protests, he picks her up into his arms. He carries her out of the house in a hurry. Scott and Isaac wait anxiously on the lawn. He slows to bark briefly at them as they turn towards the two. "Follow the trail as far as it goes."_

_"He won't—"_

_"I know. But at least we'll have a starting point."_

_She is almost unconscious, her head against his shoulder, her eyes too heavy. "Lydia_…_"_

_"We'll find her." He promises her, not quite believing it himself, needing to say it. He kicks open his car door and sets her down inside, so careful not to break her, not to tear her. He sets her down and he promises, "We'll find her."_

* * *

While he goes to fetch Melissa McCall, he leaves Allison in an on-call room. She has about five minutes of peace and solitude before the door bursts open and a short skirt and a perfectly coiffed head of strawberry blonde curls rushes inside, shutting it hard behind her. The brunette sits up in a reluctant swing of motion from where she laid down on the bunk that smells of scrubs and soap. Rolls her eyes skyward with a sigh. Brings her legs up. Props her arms on her knees. Asks…

"What are you doing here?"

"Stiles called me."

"You don't have to be here, Lydia."

"Maybe I don't. Maybe I do. What's going on? Why do you need Melissa?"

The redhead has come to interrogate her. Revving up to do so when she preempts her by making a demand. Distracting her. "I need you to take Stiles somewhere else while I talk to her. He can't be here for this."

"For what? Allison, what is going on? Is it some kind of consequence to the spell?" she needs to know. Urgent as if prepared to panic. "Of coming here?"

And the older girl doesn't understand why she cares so much, why she is so worried, since she keeps assuring that she knows Allison is not her best friend, not a carbon copy replacement for an Allison that died before she ever got here. They've known each other a few weeks, a month or two at most, so she shouldn't be this concerned. Deadpan, horribly hollow in a way she has to be to be able to say it, she says so bluntly, "More like the consequences of being stupid and having sex with no protection with my boyfriend before I killed him."

"Oh," is all Lydia can respond with, falling back against the door. What is there really to say to something like that? But as it sinks in, she moves past the surface and comprehends the situation. "Oh! Oh, my God. You're not serious. You're not really—"

"That's what it looks like."

"Holy crap," her companion says softly, heavily, her eyes straying.

Allison _almost_ wants to laugh. "Yeah. So I need you to take Stiles and get out of here."

"But—"

"Lydia."

The redhead nods, brow scrunching up. "Right. Okay. Fine. I'll kick Stiles out." And when she opens her mouth to say thanks, she adds on a firm, "But I'm not going anywhere."

"I just need an ultrasound," she tells the banshee, like it isn't a big deal, like she isn't about to crack inside, isn't hanging by a thread. "I need to know. I have to see it."

"And if you're right?" Lydia asks, in this careful kid gloves way, gingerly lowering herself to sit at the edge of the bunk by her feet. "What will you do?"

She doesn't answer. Doesn't know. Just shakes her head, arms tightening around her knees as she wets her lips and draws a sharp breath, maintaining the mask of vacant expression with effort. Great effort. But the sympathetic look on the other girl's pale porcelain china doll face makes that extremely difficult. Makes her have to divert some of energy into suppressing the dark volatility of this girl trying to be _supportive_ and _worried_ and _pity her_ that makes her want to lash out and bite. But like with Stiles earlier, she manages to swallow the ugly emotions, manages to resist the urge. They don't deserve that. But just because she doesn't snap her head off and chase her away with a few calculatedly cruel words doesn't mean she can bear up under her concern and her friendship, and especially not her comforting touch. When she reaches out a hand and lays it intimately onto Allison's forearm, skin to skin, delicate fingers curving its shape, squeezing strongly, she needs to push her back. Because there is a not insignificant part of her afraid of accidentally hurting Lydia, she just unwinds her arms, unbends her legs, surging up off the bunk and around the redhead to get away from her. She paces the cramped length of the room instead. Pretending she can't feel compassionate green eyes following her every inch of the way.

_What will you do? _Good question. _What will you do, Allison?_

She can't kill it. She can't do that. She doesn't have the right to do that. Not after everything that she has done to him already. She does not have the right to kill his baby. As much as she does need this to not be happening. As much as she can't stomach the thought of it. Or of it _not_ turning out true and real and being alive inside her, this living growing little piece of him, of something almost like hope bottled up in a tiny unformed package. Everything is all twisted up inside of her. None of it makes sense. She can't stand the idea of being _pregnant_. _Her_. Of _her_ having some baby. Here or over there or anywhere. She isn't— She isn't built for that. She isn't capable of it. Not after all this. After everything. But if she can't save him, _save them_, if she can't get him back and she is left all alone for good, or she is stuck here with these people, playing bad second place to a heroic beloved Allison Argent she has nothing in common with, will never live up to, still all alone only all alone _here_ because they aren't hers, won't ever be hers, she just can't bear the possibility of not having anything left of him. But a baby? The reality of another living being? Of creating a human. Of raising it. That is the cruelest conflict of all. How could she possibly be that selfish? To inflict herself on a helpless little human being. Being a mother would be her worst sin of all.

Realistically, it isn't even counting the situation as a factor. She is stranded in the wrong world with the wrong people, working with an untrustworthy witch to cast a seriously traumatic costly spell on her to shift her back to her own universe, where there is absolutely _nothing_ that awaits her but a graveyard full of ghosts. Oh, and a warrant out for her arrest for murdering the only guy she ever really loved. The _well, this witch worked magic on him and turned him crazy and he asked me to kill him_ defense doesn't fly so well with the authorities. Imagine that.

Even if by some miracle, she succeeds and the witch sends her back to her own timeline equal with this one, into this year, and she can somehow stop what happens to bring them to their end, how would that work out? There can't be two Allisons in one timeline. Magic won't allow for that. If she manages to do it, to save them, she would have to die to reset order. She couldn't go back forward into the future, into her present, after she'd changed the timeline, because there would be no room for her there, because the Allison living in the moment she went backwards to would live her life leading to the present she left behind to change the past. She is out of place. Stranded. Adrift. There is no room for her anywhere. The only way she could survive would be staying here, but she can't do that, because she has to go back. She has to fix what she broke.

She owes it to him. To all of them.

So this is a complication she really can't account for. It doesn't fit. There is no room for this in her plans, in her circumstances, and she can't adjust for it. Maybe that is her latest punishment. For failing them. For what she did to him. She can't get rid of it and she can't keep it. But she can't just pretend. And she can't take this. She can't breathe.

"Allison," Lydia is saying through the haze of her own hysterical voice in her head, "Allison, listen to me. Are you hearing me?" She takes her by the shoulders, interrupting her freakout by standing in her way, by grabbing hold of her and shaking her free from the spinning out that is happening in her head. Forcing her eyes on hers. Forcing her to breathe. "It is going to be okay, Allison. It's going to be okay. Say it with me."

"It'll be okay," she says dazedly, distractedly, letting it out on a shaky breath.

Lydia nods. Doesn't let her look away or lose focus. "It'll be okay. We'll figure it out."

* * *

TBC

_AN: I don't know though. Should I continue?_


	7. if

.

**IF YOU MUST**

**_if_**

* * *

Lydia is in his bed when she breaks quietly into the Stilinski house in the middle of the night. She shows up in the doorway, finds Lydia in his bed, and Stiles asleep on the other side, pressed in against the wall. It's his house. His room. She just came to look in on him. To see his sleeping face and pretend for a second. She hadn't intended to come any closer. Just to stand here and see him. She can't sleep. She thought it would help. But she didn't expect Lydia to be there. Or for her eyes to be open and looking at the girl in the doorway. Studying her in the silence.

After a minute, whatever she infers from her features makes the redhead flip the covers down in obvious gesture, her expression softly beckoning. Allison isn't sure what makes her venture in, only that she breathes out and walks forward, crawling carefully into bed beside her best friend, or a varied version of her at least. Careful so that Stiles doesn't wake up. She is on the very edge, burrowing her feet under the corner of covers once she takes off her shoes, body pressed against Lydia's just faintly, her side touching the redhead's front since her back is flush to the boy's arm, his head turned towards the wall, his other arm flung over his pillow. This close, she can see that the other girl is fully dressed beneath the sheets, but still… Her Lydia and Stiles weren't the kind of friends that slept in the same bed. Allison and Stiles were, but not Lydia and Stiles. It changes her mind on what she'd decided things were like here. She doesn't want that to bother her, but it probably does, somewhere beneath the stubborn denial.

"So you two—"

"No," she whisperingly interrupts. "God, no. We were doing homework." Then with a different kind of tone, "My parents are out of town. I don't like being in the house alone."

_And on nights like these_, Allison thinks, _she probably used to spend them at the Argent house_. She doesn't know why that makes her feel guilty. "But he does love you."

The younger girl rolls her eyes, a patronizing smile on her still glossed lips. "No, he doesn't. He thinks he does. Or rather _did_. He thought he did for a couple of years. Since middle school. But he doesn't. We're friends."

"We were friends."

"We're not your kind of friends. I promise."

"I don't care," she tells her, softly and sadly, looking away. "It's none of my business."

Irritated, Lydia disagrees, "Yes, it is. Don't pretend that it isn't. Don't act like that. You're in love with him. Like really in love. Not just teenager love."

Shaking her head against the pillow, Allison dismisses, "Not this him."

"This him. Any him. You're in love." Pushing upright a little, Lydia looks down at her as silken locks of strawberry blonde fall over one green eye. "It doesn't matter if he remembers how you got to be that way. You still love him. And now that you're pr—"

"Shut up, Lydia." Her barely hearable voice pitches sharply in warning. Loses the softness they carry back and forth to stay hushed. "Don't ever say that out loud."

Lying back down, lowering her head back onto the pillow beside Allison's, her friend tells her, "You can't just keep living in denial. It's going to start to show soon. In fact, it's probably already. If you weren't wearing such loose shirts, we'd all already know."

_Four months_. Yeah. They'd all already know. She _is_ showing. Little by little, she is growing out more every day. And every day, she wakes up with horrible morning sickness, worse and worse as the trimester progresses. Controlling the hormonal shifts and the aching and the upchucking and everything else, all of that she can handle, can control, can hide, but the banshee is right. She will have to face facts eventually. Sooner rather than later. Melissa said the sickness symptoms should fade soon, should've already started fading by now, and she should start feeling more energized. That hasn't happened. But the quickening… The quickening she warned her about has happened quite a few times. And the older woman, the mom, she told her it would be an experience, that it might make her feel better about this whole thing. That it was supposed to be this warm joy that would overcome the fear and dread and sickened unhappiness, feeling this thing moving inside of her womb, feeling this baby flutter, this baby that her body is freaking _growing_ all by itself now. But that didn't happen. No, it didn't chase away the fear and dread and sickened unhappiness and all of a sudden turn this situation into some unlikely wonderful miracle that she fiercely wants to hang onto. All it did was leave her feeling like Sigourney Weaver. Like an alien is wriggling inside of her, going to rip itself out, and all she felt was scared.

She can't do this.

There was a moment, just one brief second, when her shirt was lifted up and her stomach was sticky with gel and the probe was rubbing back and forth over her uterus and Melissa McCall was smiling at the ultrasound screen, pointing out fuzzy black and white shadows while she laid flat and vulnerable on her back on an exam table with Lydia trying to hold her hand, even when she kept telling her to knock it off, so there was a single second of time where she listened to the soft rhythmic crescendo of a heartbeat thumping thickly, racing so fast, that she considered the faint possibility that this might end up being a good thing. A great thing. But then the moment ended and she looked away. She pushed the woman's hand back and pulled her shirt down and swung up off the table and said, _that's enough_, _thanks_, and walked out.

How could it be a good thing? How good it be anything but salt in the fatal wounds? This isn't a new dawn. This isn't her thread of a bright future emerging gently from the wreckage of her life, of the ashes from everything she loves, a ruined world. This isn't that. This is a cruel joke.

"It's hard to sleep by myself."

The girl between her and Stiles is half drifted when she confesses this, but her eyelids lift and she gives a quiet sigh in reaction, neither looking at each other now. "I know."

And quieter still, "I don't know what I'm going to do."

"I know," is all the redhead says again, but her hand slips off her stomach to press into the bed between them, to graze cool fingertips delicately down the brunette's arm, down her wrist, lacing lightly with her own, squeezing strongly when she doesn't shy from the grasp.

On the other side of the bed, Stiles keeps his eyes closed and his breathing regulated relaxed. Listening. Not understanding all of it, but listening all the same. Absorbing it. Remembering for some reason the way she kissed him that first day. Pressed her naked body hard against him like she couldn't breathe without him. In the moment, he was too distracted with shock to really fully register it to the full affect, to the feel of it, to the girl crushed against him, desperate and relieved in a way that would've knocked him over had she not been holding on for dear life. The shock of who the girl was, of the intensity of her advance, it kept him from appreciating the sheer moment. But afterwards… Afterwards, when the eyes of all of their friends weren't gaping at them, when he was left alone with nothing to hide but from himself, able to think his own thoughts without the worry of anyone else involved, it was a whole different story. It was almost…

"Does he still sleepwalk?" she asks, in lieu of nothing. Jars him off that line of thinking.

Lydia answers, "Sometimes."

And so the hunter tells her, nothing for context, "I was a light sleeper." Which is an odd thing. Until she says, "I was a light sleeper so I could wake up when he started to go. It wouldn't bother me when he turned over or thrashed, but the second he'd put his feet on the floor, I was awake." And suddenly it makes sense. "I wouldn't hold onto him or pin him down. All I had to do was put my arm around him, like a seatbelt, and he would lay back down and be okay." There is a moment of quiet after this. Telling silence. Then, "All he needed was a seatbelt."

"You took care of each other."

Allison doesn't agree or rebuke that assertion. Just whispers, "Now I can't wake up at all."

* * *

_Once the nogitsune is gone from him, she wakes to her name on his lips more than one night. "Ally. Ally. No," he'll say, muttering in his sleep, tossing and turning. He shifts and struggles under nightmare paralysis, fisting white knuckles in the sheets at his sides, mumbling her name over and over in helpless strain, fighting against the darkness, against the guilt and grief and panic at what he could have done, what he would have done, even worse than what he had done. "Allison_…_"_

_This isn't new. This isn't unusual._

_He pulled her from the water, kept her breathing by sheer force of will, refused to let her give up. He gave her a reason to fight. But she can't save him from this. All she can do is be here._

_Humming softly soothing sounds before she is even really awake yet, Allison rolls towards him, half opening her eyes. She strokes fingers through sweat matted dark hair, presses her mouth faintly to his temple, mumbles unimportant things against his clammy damp skin, comforting things that mean nothing in the end. And yet mean everything. "It's alright. I'm here. Everything will be alright. It's gone now. We're alright. Shh, baby. I'm right here."_

_It takes him awhile, so deeply inside trapped, so thickly enmeshed in the horror and the sickness. Heartsickness. His psyche irrevocably altered from many more things than just a demon taking root in his mind and body. Shaking him awake will only make it worse. Dragging him sharply from sleep only hurts him. After the first few times of feeling the violence of that act, she learned better ways to save him from it. She makes him stir, and with that comes the increase of the agitation, making him arch upwards, his brow furrowed painfully and his breath almost frantic now, his muttering growing harsher and faster, more fervent, desperate with it as the dark feels her calling and tries to hold onto him tighter. It never lets go easy._

_She climbs behind him as he begins to really thrash, wrapping her arms around his shoulders, around his chest, her legs around his torso, hugging him strongly as he struggles, a still somewhat sedated fight so far tonight. "I'm here. It's alright," she insists, turning her head, her mouth moving against his ear, her eyes shutting in the strive. "I've got you. Hear me? I've got you."_

* * *

Some part of her knows this is a dream. She didn't at first. Not at first, when she stood by and watched her father die, when she couldn't remember how she'd gotten from there to standing at the very edge of a black infinity, watching her feet balance on the ledge of ending rock that cut off an impossibly high cliff above the city, above the world, a full moon in a bruised starry sky and no electric light in sight. Not even when she lifted her arms outward and tipped forward, free falling with her eyes closed and zero fear to feel, nothing but utter relief in fact. The weeping relief even, but she isn't crying. Déjà vu is a strong sense. She has been here before. She has done this before. This has all happened before. But she never went over. She never fell. This time, nothing pulls her back from the edge. Nothing keeps her from letting go. And suddenly everything is the way it was always supposed to be. Everything is alright and in its place, a brightness about the world, soft too in a weird palpable way, even though she isn't touching anything. She is standing on her own in a world of white. There is no sound, but the silence doesn't hurt like usual. Instead it means peace. Rest perhaps. Rest in peace. An end to _fight_ and _strife_ and _survive_. Relief of the weight in her heart and the darkness swallowing her whole. To the pain. That endless pain. And still she doesn't yet realize what this is. But then she sees him. He calls her name, his voice familiar and devastating and his tone light and unburdened in a way she hasn't heard in years, a smile in that voice, and it makes her turn, makes her turn towards him, find him there waiting for her in all the whiteness. Then she knows. Then she understands. This is dreaming.

"You're here," she says softly, faintly, not quite ready to smile at him the way he does for her, moving toward her because she is frozen.

"I'm here," he tells her, drawing closer. So close she could almost reach out and touch him. She doesn't dare, but she could, because he is so close. "I was here all along."

"I'm sorry I didn't come sooner."

"Don't be." His smile turns wistful here, and just a little wry, and she thinks it should hurt, should make her ache, but she doesn't feel it. His hands in his pockets, he stands in front of her, right in front of her, his eyes clear and crystalline shades of gray, of blue too, and all she wants to do is lock her arms around him, to cling forever. "You shouldn't stay."

"I can't leave you."

The smile deepens, amused a little, his eyes sparkling. "Yes, you can."

"Let me stay with you," she pleads softly, faintly, not quite ready to reach out but needing to as the sensation of slipping away grips her inside, making her panic somewhere beneath the calm. Beneath the peace. "Please let me stay." She is reaching for him, and then she is touching him and shocked and sobbing once with wonderful surprise because she hadn't actually believed she could really touch him, could feel him, half thinking he would disappear the second her hand got close. But he doesn't disappear. Her hand falls to his shoulder, pushing there as her fingers furl and grip at its curve, in its corded sinewy muscle, pulling herself into him from that tether, crashing hard into his body with her own, arms latching desperately around him as her head shakes and her face buries in his neck. "_Please_. I don't wanna go."

"Ally," he says on a strong sigh, sounding almost fondly disappointed. His arms settle loosely around her waist like she is some delicate thing. Or like he is impatient for letting her go when all she can do to keep breathing is fight that feeling. "You owe me your life, don't you? Isn't that what you're always saying?" She nods jerkily against him. "Then do this for me. Pay your debt by giving me what I want for you. Go and do the right thing. Go now. Don't look back."

"I don't know what that means. I don't know what you want."

Sighing again, softer this time, he drops his head, and as she feels the cool press of his lips on her shoulder, arms tightening briefly around her, he whispers, "Yes, you do."

_You've always known, Ally._

His voice echoes hollowly in her head when the white world is gone, almost as abruptly as she found herself there, and the loss of his body held in her arms, of his own circling her, is crippling. For a second, her eyes open to the warm golden light of day, to the harsh real world, and she can't move or feel or breathe. Adjusting to the hollow existence she has come to know now returned. No peace. No rest. It's never over. It never ends.

_A ghost isn't Casper or Carrie. A ghost is just the thick silence in a room. That awful awareness of the one you loved never coming back to you._

There is sunlight streaming in between the slates of the blinds on the bedroom windows and a comfortable morning hush to the house. She is half on her side, lying at the edge of the mattress, one arm curved over her stomach, one hanging just a little off the bed, and she feels Lydia asleep at her back. But it is only the two of them left. Her opened eyes find Stiles sitting forward in his desk chair, elbows on his knees, fingers loosely steepled against his mouth, watching her intently. The expression on his face is troubled. Thoughtful. Their gazes meet and she stills, forgetting for a moment the intention of swinging up and sneaking out before anyone wakes, stilling in guarded surprise before she can settle into consciousness and begin the day. Tension crackles in the quiet. Energy arcs with restrained pressure. Patience.

He doesn't say anything. Just keeps right on watching her. Trying to figure her out. Figure out _something_ anyway. And she doesn't like it. She doesn't like that look about him. Those distracted penetrating eyes turned blue in the early light.

Allison pushes upright slowly, glancing backwards at the girl on her other side, and then tries to shove her legs off the edge and bend to snatch her boots off the floor. Tries being the operative word there. Soon as she upends, dizziness hits her hard. Nausea secondly. The vertigo makes her topsy but the sudden pitching heave her stomach takes keeps her from having the time to steady through it. Any intention of getting the hell out of here will have to wait. She throws herself up at the open doorway, catching the jamb as she slips on the hardwood taking the turn down the hall, racing to the bathroom to crash down onto her knees over the toilet and upchuck _hard_ before she can catch her breath. A great way to wake up. And the McCall mother had called her _lucky_ as her morning sickness actually comes in the mornings.

Right. She feels lucky. _Real_ lucky.

"Oh. Shit. That's…" Stiles trails off when he comes in after her and sees her hanging haggardly, coughing up bile post the throes of violent vomit, looking generally miserable. After a minute of standing there on the threshold, he moves to the sink without a word, wetting a washcloth before he crouches down beside the preoccupied girl. He hesitates, hand held toward her with the cloth, but then he pushes wariness aside and awkwardly gathers up her long waves of hair from the way, holding it back while she finishes heaving. Wiping the rag down along a soiled lock of azure dye, cleaning the vomit off, and then where it rubbed onto her neck.

When she is done and can talk again, she shuts the lid and slams the lever to flush it away and drops her head down onto her forearm where it rests across the covered basin and, with her eyes shut tightly, groans to the boy, "Go away."

"Yeah. Sure. No problem," he sighs, dropping the dirty washcloth into the sink on his way out. He latches the door closed behind him. Mutters something unintelligible from this side under his breath before speaking clearer to his father when the sheriff throws a question from the kitchen. Explaining away the episode casually. Being what passes for discreet from him for her. Which she appreciates in a vague uninterested way.

After she showers, and brushes her teeth with one of the throwaway toothbrushes in a basket under the sink, which she thinks is pretty weird, Allison is coming out of the bathroom wearing a terrycloth robe off the hook on the back of the door, her hair wet as she towels through its length, eyes finding Stiles sitting forward on the sofa in the living room like he had been in his desk chair, staring at the air, when Scott barges into the house, a quiet Isaac right behind him. By the look on his face and the exclaiming demeanor about his abrupt entrance, she knows exactly what is gonna come out of his mouth but is too slow to stop it.

"You're _pregnant_?!"

Yep. That was it. "So much for confidentiality," she mutters wryly, letting the towel drop from her hair as she sighs and rolls her eyes up. She should've known ignoring Melissa's attempts to get a better line on her would make the woman take steps to force the issue.

As the sheriff comes out of the kitchen, coffee mug in hand, and Lydia emerges sleepily from the bedroom, all heads turning towards the foyer, there could have been a better time and place. But here it is. And when she doesn't instantly scoff and deny, Scott swings from his initial outrage of disbelief into setting back on his heels in unhappy surprise. "It's true? You're—" He glances left into the living room then back at her. "You're gonna have Stiles's kid?"

To which his dad startles archly, "Excuse me?"

Looking outraged at his son, who is a deer caught in headlights, having stood up as the door burst open only to drop dazedly back down again at the news. "Wha—" But he can't talk quite yet. His brain is tripped. "I…" He looks to Scott. "_What_?"

The sheriff is pitiless to this. "Stiles. I am far too young to become a grandfather."

"It isn't like that," Lydia tries to explain from the hallway.

And the boy adds, "It's not physically possible!"

"Does that really matter?" Scott challenges, his question pointed at Allison.

"Yes," she insists, not worked up or floored or on edge like the rest of them but not thrilled by having to have this conversation or be confronted by these people with business that isn't any of their own either.

"Okay." Sheriff Stilinski sets his coffee down on the kitchen table, looking in at the four teens from the dining room. "Somebody tell me what the hell is going on around here."

His son stammers, "I-I don't—" Eyes skating fast from face to face. "I don't—"

Allison intervenes, more out of impatience than any empathy. Holding up a hand, she angles toward the older man. "Yes, I am pregnant. No. Not _his_," she assures, gesturing dismissively over at the stunned Stiles.

Scott's gaze never wavers from the girl. "But that's not what DNA will say. Is it?"

She looks back at him for his quiet question, sighs tiredly, not answering as they all exchange bothered stares. Scott is jealous. Or just irrationally bothered by the idea. Stiles is at a loss. Upset. Overwhelmed. He stands up again, searching for sense. Sits down heavy on the sofa for the third time since Scott stormed in. Hand lightly over his own mouth as he absorbs the suggestion of this strange predicament. _Pregnant_? His kid. His baby. _Pregnant_? It sounds freaking ridiculous. It has no business being true. It makes no sense. Stuff like this belongs in an ultra contrived sci-fi series. Or a bizarro episode of _Teen Mom_. Not here. Not the real world. Werewolves and druids and the occasional banshee, sure, but an alternate universe Allison pregnant and a Stiles is the father? No. That is just plain wrong. Just plain absurd.

"I need to sit down."

Leaning against his bedroom doorframe, Lydia says, "Stiles, you are sitting down."

"Oh. Okay. I should … not move then."

Breaking away from the standstill, Allison announces, "Great. Well, I'm just gonna go."

The redhead tries halfheartedly to stop her when she brushes past her getting into his room, not finding her voice, braving to crack the silence, but by turning with her as she passes, trying to touch her shoulder, an imploring expression on her pretty porcelain doll face. Which the brunette girl ignores. Nobody moves or speaks or even breathes loudly while she gets dressed and takes off, everybody stuck in the moment, struck by the development. A failing uncomfortable quiet about the crowded house.

"Scott, man." Stiles finally finds his words. "Are you sure?"

Not looking his way, his friend answers, "She admitted it herself, didn't she?"

"Yeah, but—"

"She is," Lydia softly interrupts, sobering him again. Wrists crossed low in front of her, she has her focus cast down when she tells them, "We're on the fourth month of it."

"_We_?" Scott echoes pointedly, but the girl only shrugs.

"Jesus Christ," his dad breathes out, heavy with a harsh sigh, feeling like an old man. "Think I better sit down too." So he pulls on a kitchen chair and falls into it hard.

"You were a little harsh on her," Isaac mentions under his breath at the other wolf's shoulder. The first he has spoken since they showed up.

Fixing his brooding gaze on the wall straight ahead, Scott says, "I didn't mean to be."

"Stiles, are you okay?" Lydia wants to know.

"Yeah. Sure. Fine. Why wouldn't I be?" he dazedly retorts, looking up but not focusing on any of the varied faces around him. He is on the inside exactly as he looks on the out. Stunned hard. Confused. Conflicted. Crazy freaked out. Because it's his. He hasn't ever slept with Allison Argent, but she has his baby inside of her. Four months along. Four months worth of baby growing inside of her with his genetics. It's insane. It's ten freaking degrees of insanity. And then confronted with them all and their muted myriad reactions, she just walks out? Abandoning them. Like they don't even matter. Like they don't even factor. And they obviously don't. Not to her. Sure. Of course. Why wouldn't he be peachy?

"I know it's not your fault," Scott admits, "and that you didn't actually touch her," and this is where his tone gets tighter, "but I still want to punch you in the face a little."

Yeah. He gets that. Says simply, "Totally understandable."

* * *

_The first time she sees the group again is her first day back at school since she was released from the hospital. They try to say hi and go their own ways after the obligatory _so glad you're alright now_ and all that. But she senses something is up. Stiles is dismissively supportive. Scott is all fidgety and can't get away from her fast enough. Lydia tries to pull her down the hall, distracting her with nosy questions and inane gossip. Allison knows not to fall for that, not to get hurt feelings for taking it personally or let them divert her, because she wants to be involved. She will be. So she sees Lydia into class then slips inconspicuously away, following the boys off to their obvious secret council meeting. Weird that they have it in the library, but she doesn't mention it, just sneaks up on them huddled in the stacks, whispering urgently. Taps on a scrawny shoulder to startle the boys._

_"What's going on?"_

_"Ack! Jesus, Allison. Don't do that!" Stiles whisper yells, jumping and spinning like a heart attack when she touches him, when she appears out of nowhere behind him while he is pretending to read the book in his hands, a space in the shelves at eye level letting him converse back and forth between Scott and Isaac on the next aisle over._

_"Then don't ditch me," she retorts without sympathy, quirking an arch eyebrow._

_"We weren't—"_

_"It's nothing you have to worry about, okay?" Scott interjects, quelling the defensive vehemence of his best friend before he can spill too much. "You've missed so much school already. Do you really think you should be skipping class so soon?"_

_"I'm not behind," she tells him impatiently, "I caught up from home."_

_"Still—"_

_"Please," she cuts him off, rolling her eyes. Shoving the scrawny shoulder near her to make room, she falls to lean against the shelf, lowering her voice. "Something serious is happening. I've heard my parents talking. An alpha pack on the way and disappearing betas? They won't tell me a lot but it is enough to know you can use all the help you've got access to."_

_"You just got out of the hospital."_

_"I'm fine. I'm totally recovered. Utilize me."_

_"Allison, seriously," Stiles steps in._

_But she doesn't give him the chance. "Look, I came to let you know that the wolves have bigger things to worry about than the alphas."_

_This turns Scott's frown interested. "What does that mean?"_

_"That means bad things are brewing with the hunters. I've overhead them talking. Huge parades of hunters tromping through the house, convening in the cellar almost every night. I'm worried this whole thing with Kate and Derek has given Gerard ideas."_

_"Speaking of," the boy pressed beside her whispers, "Your grandfather is seriously creepy."_

_"The old man sliced this poor guy in half in the woods the other night," Isaac reveals._

_Stiles adds, "Do you have any idea the Nazi regime he's turned this place into?"_

_"Tell me about it." She pauses, biting into her bottom lip for a split second, debating whether or not to divulge what she says next. Playing with the binding of a shelved book before her rather than meet any of their intent gazes focused on her, fingernails digging at it, she confesses, "My dad was afraid of what he might do if he knew it was me that killed Kate. So he told him it was a wolf."_

_"What?!" all three boys exclaim at once._

_"I know. I know. I tried to stop him but—"_

_"Allison, how could you let this happen?" Scott accuses._

_Isaac murmurs absently, "No wonder he's hunting for us."_

_"You're his own granddaughter," Scott continues, giving her the disappointed look. "How could you let them pin that on us? He wouldn't hurt you."_

_But she doesn't say anything. And neither does Stiles, who is watching her closely, his expression sober and knowing with subtle horrible suspicion. The underlying current of question is clear in their shared quiet. That possibility of the apple having not fallen so far from the tree. There must've been a good reason Chris would lie about something like that to their own father. Which was what first stopped her from shouting out the truth. But the longer it sits with her, all the more difficult it is to not set things straight._

_"You have to tell him," Scott insists, while Stiles opens his mouth, looking like he wants to argue. "Allison. You have to. People are dying because of this."_

_"I know. And I will. I'd already planned to. I just_…_"_

_"What?" Isaac asks._

_The girl swallows, sucking in a deep breath, looking up at the trio with dread filling her features. "I don't think it will make a difference."_

_"How could it not?!"_

_"I think Kate was just the excuse he needed. I think he's been waiting for this."_

_"What do you mean?"_

_"I mean," she says, voice strengthening in stern grimness, "I know what a man hell-bent on war looks like. And I think it's too late."_

_"God. Your family just keeps getting better and better," Isaac drawls softly, sarcastically, as he is drawn to rotate around, giving them his back. "Do you hear that?"_

_Which is all the warning they get before the lights overhead start flickering to black and shatter, before the floor starts shaking like an earthquake is rumbling through the school, before the window at the far end of the library bursts inward and something comes flying inside with a shrill shriek and strange hiss, skittering along the ceiling. An arm wraps around her waist as she stumbles. Yanks her backwards out of the way as books scatter in an avalanche of crashing onslaught and the stacks all topple like domino. She slams into the ground, body smacking against Stiles when he pulls her down, wrenching her just short of the slant of a bookshelf. He lands under her and yet somehow suddenly is bent over her, covering her body with his own, arms up and shielding her head from falling debris. The shouts and screams ring in her ears, disorienting the girl, flashing lights and raining sparks all around them, making it impossible to figure out what the hell is going on. A heavy shelf tips towards the pair, almost coming down on them, and Stiles presses her harder into the floor, weighing down on her in a brace for impact. The top corner tip of the shelf catches on the edge of a support column, keeping it maybe a few inches shy of crushing them, and she peeks up from under him with wide eyes to find it towering precariously above. The whole library is still shaking, still screaming, and she still tries to crawl from beneath him, tries to get out into the thick of it and see what is happening and be some kind of help, some kind of useful, but every time she goes to move, his hold tightens. Which is probably saving her life, since the sky is still falling, as if the building is caving in on top of them all. They stay huddled there out of the way, buried beneath piles of books, bruised and shaken, barely in one piece. They stay and they wait. Riding it out._

_She was supposed to be different now. Better. A real hunter. But a hunter doesn't hide. Cowering like a coward. Hunters are heroes. The antithesis of everything Aunt Kate had been._

_So much for her new resolution of becoming stronger._

* * *

She expects Lydia, so it surprises her when it's Stiles who comes to find her up at the bluffs. Ventured far onto the narrow ledge of a steep outcropping at its peak, she sees his headlights on the road before she hears the vehicle round the curve and park. He is nervous and reluctant as he traverses the distance, spends a minute breathing unevenly as he pauses at the edge, looking over at the intimidating drop into dark wood. He backs warily away and lowers carefully down to sit on her blanket beside the girl.

"So, um, I guess... Do you wanna talk—"

"No."

"Right," he replies quickly, a sharp nod of his head in compliance, knowing it would be better for his welfare if he let it drop. "Are you sure you don't wanna talk—"

"I'm sure."

"'Cause, you know, if you did—"

"Stiles."

"Right. I hear you." And he really isn't going to try again to initiate a conversation she doesn't want to have with him. He really isn't. Because she definitely isn't interested in that idea. And that makes that idea potentially hazardous to his health. So he really doesn't plan to press the matter. Until he does. "But we should really discuss some stuff, don't you think?"

"No, Stilinski. I don't think." If the biting irritation in her tone hasn't scared him off yet, she is fairly certain anything short of actual physical violence won't make more of a difference than stiff danger sign warning has. To derail the baby talk, or plans, she confides, "I wonder about that kiss my first day here." Then turns her head and asks, "What did you feel when I kissed you?"

Immediately, he gets rigid with discomfort, with awkward reluctance and the absolute urge to be anywhere but here, discussing _this_ of all things. Now he knows how she feels. "Um. I don't—" He stammers a second, indecisive on what to say, what to think. Diplomatically chooses instead, "There was shock. There wasn't time for much else."

"So if I kissed you again, you might feel something more than shock?" she poses with a lightly curious tone, a mild cant to her head as she studies his profile as he studiously focuses elsewhere on the dark night skyline. "If I kissed you again."

"That's not…" He shifts where he sits on the rock. "That's a horrible idea."

Softly, unemotionally, "Why?"

"Because… Because _because_. I don't know. It just is."

"Because you don't want me. Because you know you could never love me."

"No. No!" he jumps to assure, to backpedal, still somewhat offensively wary, as if he is scared she might tackle him any moment. "That's not— That isn't how I meant it. You're— You're easy to love. You're really easy to love." He actually manages to look at her when he reassures her this. His gaze is shifty and his hands are gesticulating in that restless way of his, but he looks at her as he says it. "That's why Scott fell in love at first sight, right? That's why Isaac…"

"Not with me."

"The other you. But you're like her. Kind of. I mean, you're _you_, you know. But still—"

"And I don't care about Scott. I don't want Scott. I don't want Isaac either. I, me, _this_ Allison wants Stiles." There is in impulse to latch onto his wrist and tug him down leftover from _her_ Stiles because he appears overdue to bolt. But she bites back the reflex. Keeps her voice level. Infuriatingly level. "Stiles is the only person I care about caring about me."

"But not me," he checks, struggling to find his footing in this conversation.

"Not you," she confirms, adhering to what she has been telling them and herself all along here among these alter people. Then, after a beat, she changes tactics with an offhand, "Maybe you."

The boy resituates anxiously at her side. Admits, "I don't know what to do with that."

"Me neither."

"But you're the one—"

"I _know_ you, I _love_ you," she says, like _no big deal_, rolling her eyes at his nerves, looking away. "The only thing that makes it hurt is that you don't know me. You don't love me. But if I'm being completely honest, I know that you're still Stiles, and in any world, any version," she confides as Lydia's words last night echo in her head, "I still love Stiles. So as long as I'm here, I'm going to be in love with you. Just to get all our cards on the table. You okay with that?"

"That… I mean, I guess it's… No. Yeah." Nodding to himself, he says, "I'll get used to it."

"You do that," she drawls, dry and condescending. Lays down on her back across the blanket, rests her hands low on her stomach, sighs out a long breath as she fixes her attention on the sky. More or less dismissing him from existence.

Riding on the awkwardness, on the teenage boy imperative to escape, he gets up to go without complaint or question. Makes it almost to his jeep before his feet falter. He hesitates. Stops going as it hits him. Grimaces at himself when he realizes what happened. "Wait. _Wait_. Hold on a sec." Throwing up his hands, he swivels around at her. "That whole _if I kiss you_ thing was total bullshit, wasn't it?" Jesus, how could he let himself get played like that? "You just wanted to distract me!" he accuses, affronted, while she only angles her head to glance over herself at him, looking bored. "Oh. _Oh_. That's low."

"You think so?" she muses, not denying it, eyes skimming across the skyline away from him as he comes back to the rock and reclaims his place. "I thought it was rather honest."

"You can't ignore it forever."

"Ignore what?"

"Allison." He drops onto his back alongside her.

So she sits up sharply and inhales. "I'm not talking about this with you."

"Don't I have something to do with it?"

"No."

"Right. I get that. I really do." He has no rights here, no stake in this, but he feels like he does, and he feels like he is sorta obligated to be concerned by this, so he has to say something to her, has to at least try. Or else he won't be able to live with himself. Won't be able to live in his own head with his own thoughts like he already can't. "But I'm here. And … I'm the closest thing you've got to that thing's father, right? So you'd think you'd want my opinion."

"Your opinion?" she echoes archly.

"Yes. My opinion," he firms, instead of buckling.

"Fine. What opinion do _you_ have on your dead alternate universe self having knocked me up?" she challenges meanly, simply, having such an uncanny knack for awful emphasizing with only an unkind lack of inflection and an abundance of connotations. She's been using that weapon of hers since the day she got here to unsettle them all, to set them off their balance and back on their heels so she can slip away in the aftermath. A natural defense mechanism, he knows.

"Well, when you put it like that, I have trouble saying anything."

"But that _is_ what things are like," she presses ruthlessly. "That's what this is."

"Okay, but it isn't that simple, is it?"

"What do you want from me?" she snaps, losing patience with trying to drive him off the topic with passive aggressive jabbing. So she turns on him. Pins him lamely in place with a searing stare that leaves him speechless and powerlessly needy. "Do you want me to be Allison? That heroic girl you knew? That not-so-close friend you had?" Archer now, she insists, "Do you want me to be me? Do you want me to stick around here pining after you with a bun in the oven that, for all freaking intents and purposes, is yours, even though we never slept together? Does that sound like a plan? You want that responsibility?"

"No. Of course not."

"You're not really the teen dad type."

"I know."

"So what could you possibly expect from me?"

"Nothing!" he rushes, forcing his say in edgewise before she can keep on battering against him this way, storm clouds gathering in her dark eyes. "I don't expect anything. I don't want anything from you, Allison. I just think you should—"

"What?" she cuts sharply in on him, coldly now with a dangerous edge, a fervent ice.

"Never mind," he finishes quietly, softening beneath her gaze, falling back into powerlessness. "I don't know. I just came to make sure you were alright."

"I'm never alright," she answers, unexpectedly honest, making him look abruptly back at her, surprise in his clear gray eyes. "Not anymore. And I never will be."

Softly, compassionately, he rests his arms loosely on his bent knees and glances down while he tells her, "I don't believe that."

"You don't have to."

"Allison…"

But there isn't much to say to that. It's a sad truth and any words he might think of would be uselessly hollow. Empty promises and all that. He has a feeling she wouldn't have patience for it. But it turns out his silence earns more from her than any false assurance or naïve protest of hope could have ever. She sinks back down beside him from where she had risen onto her haunches, prepared to flee, to fight, her body mimicking the fire in her as it built through their discourse. She falls softly, gentling in defeat, in resignation, settling calmly with him, side by side.

After awhile, finally having achieved a comfortable quiet, Allison admits, "When the doctors told me it would be all but impossible to ever have kids, I was devastated. But as things got worse, as _I_ got worse, I realized it was a relief. That I would never have children, never become a mother, it seemed the best thing." She doesn't explain why or what led up to it, but just sharing this much is more than she expected herself capable of, making this much of a gesture, an extension or offer, of something like friendship. It's a waste of time, but she does it anyway. "And then he was gone and I was all alone. Now I'm here. All alone. He's still gone. I'll never get him back. No matter how I manage to save him, it will never be _me_ that gets him back. And so I haven't even begun to really come to terms with that fact, with any of it, and then this happens." She stops again, sighs again, dropping her head as her palm brushes her brow and rakes unkempt black tendrils from her face. "And I can't stand the thought of not having even a little piece of him, but I know I can't do that. There is no way I can bring a living breathing being into this world completely dependent on me to take care of it. To protect it. To teach it how to be good. I'm not capable of that."

"Maybe you are."

"No." She shakes her head, huffs out a harsh breath, looking out toward the sky. "I'm not. I let every single person that I ever loved die when I was supposed to protect them. I've done horrible unforgivable things that I can't ever come back from. How can I suffer an innocent helpless child to me of all people? To this life?"

Listening soberly, solemnly, Stiles takes a minute once she falls quiet to figure out how to say what he wants to say. "You may not be our Allison, our original Allison, but that doesn't mean we aren't here for you."

"So I should stay?" she asks liltedly, loadedly, a mildly mean challenge, tilting her head at him. "I should pretend Allison Argent faked her death then came back to life. I should settle down and raise a baby? Take her future since she won't be using it?" This all makes him very uncomfortable, because she is so adept at pointing out the wrongness of the situation with a little ironic sarcasm. "Will you be there for me, Stiles? In this picture perfect solution. Will you be there?"

"Yeah." He answers her sarcasm seriously, "Yeah, I'll be there for you. If you need me."

"Well, I don't." She turns away again. Getting short and dismissive again. "That isn't an option for me anymore. The _future_ is not my option."

"So what exactly?" he pushes. "You're just going to—"

"I'm going back," she answers plainly before he can finish asking. "See, I'm going to get back to where I belong. And then I'm going to fix things. I'll save him. I'll save you all."

"And everything will be okay again," he says softly, watching her profile from behind the girl. She has moved forward, given him her back as she focuses on the sky, focuses away from him in a determinedly impassive mood. "Just like that?"

"Yeah," she murmurs, breathing out. "Just like that."

She doesn't say that everything will be okay again _for them_. For everyone but her. She doesn't tell him that. Because there is no outcome in all this where she gets to live. So a baby? A baby isn't a problem. There won't be one. She'll be dead. And that's okay. As long as she makes things right. If she saves them, she'll save herself, after all, no matter how she dies to do it, so that will be okay. That will be perfect. She knows what she has to do.

* * *

TBC


	8. you

.

_AN: So plans have changed. Read the ending. I promise you want to. Originally, I'd intended to finish this off soon, like two chapters left soon, but I've changed my mind and this is how it's going to go now. Which is all thanks to **Sinner****forvengenz**_ _for inspiring this detour. Hope that doesn't disappoint everyone._

**IF YOU MUST**

**you**

* * *

Backsliding. That's what this would be called. They thought they were all coming closer now. Thought she was beginning to thaw and they were beginning to move past their mourning for the original hunter's girl. Thought she was settling in, not planning a betrayal, because even though it isn't that to her, it is to them, and even after Stiles informed the group of her intent, nobody had actually believed she would cross the line. And to some extent, she _had_ been beginning to thaw to them all, beginning to feel less intrusive in this timeline, more like someday perhaps belonging. But she backslides. The pregnancy and his hesitant steps toward getting to know her push her to finishing what she started. She failed her people so many times. She can't just abandon them yet. They're dead, yes, but it's not over. It'll never be over so long as there is a sliver of a chance that somehow someway she can go back and fix the problem that started this all. Eliminate herself. Eliminate her aunt before the Argents ever get to Beacon Hills.

So when the witch calls and tells her it is time, Allison doesn't let the lingering regret stop her from doing what must be done. Whatever feelings she's developed despite herself during her time here in this alter-world, feelings for Lydia, for Stiles, for the absent but palpable presence of Chris Argent and the gruff begrudging proximity of Derek Hale, she still has to do what she has to do, whatever reluctant remorse she carries for the consequences of her actions, for the mess she will be leaving them to weather. She doesn't have a choice. Or she does, but it doesn't feel that way, and so she's making her choice.

Mercy and the hunter come together on the new moon at the nemeton. Ready to cast the spell to shift her backwards and sideways to the tugging gravitational pull of a chosen tether. A focus. The witch is up in the center of the razed tree, her tools scattered around her in a makeshift altar, salt and herbal medleys powdering her hands where she has them spread wide, chanting lowly in intense tones. Allison paces restlessly along the perimeter of the stump, biting at her bottom lip, raking a hand through her hair, scanning the darkness. Her heart is racing with anticipation and hope and dread. It's thumping so loudly against her chest that she very nearly doesn't hear the fox approaching quietly from the south.

But the baby kitsune has a lot to learn.

Coming up behind her with a loaded syringe in hand to tranq her without hurting the baby, without causing conflict, Kira gets close, gets so close, before the hunter turns on her. Spinning at the last second, she catches her wrist and twists, point of the needle just shy of pricking her neck. Meeting the Asian's shocked sloe eyes, she cants her head and smiles darkly, a biting tense curve. "Next time you wanna sneak up on someone, little girl, don't wear so much perfume."

"Allison!" she hears Scott call from the treeline, rushing forward, but she doesn't take her eyes off his girl.

The fox slips a baton from under her jacket, at the small of her back, and swings it around by her free hand, so the hunter kicks out viciously, sharply, quickly, kicking her knee in on her to arc below the steel and push Kira back a few stumbled steps with a cry of pain. Flicking her wrist with the baton, she recovers, looking up with an apologetic determination. "We can't let you do this." Then pivots at her again, using the steel stick to feint an attack when her real energy is invested in another plunge of the tranq. But her wrist gets snatched again, Allison arching her upper half off its trajectory, holding her aim up short by an inch, prying it away.

"Really?" she mocks, incredulous at the attempt. Then slams her head into Kira's and the fox goes down for the count with a hard snap. TKO. But she hangs onto the sedative as the girl drops. So when Scott grabs her from behind, arms locking around her at the chest, she dispatches him all too easily, shockingly swift, kicking back into his anklebone and wrenching his thumb aside, her unoccupied hand driving the syringe down into his thigh and depressing the plunger together when she throws herself forward by the waist, hips thrusting back into his, flipping him fast over her head. Knowing the amount measured of a tranq to take out her won't be enough to combat a werewolf's metabolism for long, she keeps going as he hits his back, planting a foot in the pit of his shoulder, jerking the arm she still holds onto by the elbow, ripping the limb from its socket, breaking the bone over her knee before she moves on to deal with Isaac and a wolfed out Derek. Warning them, "You don't want to do this."

"You're right. We don't." Isaac advances slowly, hands up placatingly. "Just stop this."

Since the witch can't be reached, a closed circle of ash keeping them out when they beat at it, and her chanting hasn't diminished, Allison is the only one they can go after.

She knew it would come to this. She knew they would come to stop her. It is their job to guard against actions exactly like hers, guard against feeding the nemeton, for the sake of everyone here. But she can't help that. And she can't let them stop her. So she'll do what she has to do.

Derek is going wide, trying to circle around as Isaac approaches, going to try to take her from behind like Scott, moving to surround her. But she hears the distinct click in the distance and she knows how her father operates, how he hunts, so her gaze drifts subtly off Isaac to scan the trees until she finds him, spotting the slight rustle of underbrush, the shift of a low hanging tree limb. She waits for his moment, edging a little sideways, a little forward, meeting the beta in the middle by positioning him almost between her and the scope of her father's rifle, not fully in the way but close enough. Fully in the way would stop his shot. She doesn't want that. Right when they think they have her, she lunges at him, lunging down onto one knee, a fist bunching in his shirt to hold him up as her other catches his wrist and bends it into a compliance trick. The tranq dart hits into Isaac's back instead of her shoulder it had been aimed for. Getting the submissive out of this fight without hurting him. But before she can shove his collapsing body away and spin, she is hefted up off her feet by the ex alpha, a controlling grip on the nape of her neck. Rather than flinch, she is quick to pull a dagger and flip it, slicing the blade under his wrist, making his grip wrench away. By the time she rises and turns, he shakes off the pain of an opened forearm and catches her again to rip the girl's feet from the ground. His hands are bruising her ribs where they hold her tautly, wolf talons cutting into her skin, forcing her up against his chest, using brute strength and will to bash through skill, pushing her high for her father's aim. But she won't go down easy. She arches, strung painfully like a bow in her struggle, gritting her teeth against the strain. She kicks him hard in the hip and the inner thigh and jams her knife down into his corded shoulder, looking to hurt, her legs wrapping tight about his torso as he roars out the pain, flinging herself backwards as she twists the blade into muscle and bone, breaking from his crushing grasp in a backbend that takes him down headfirst to the dirt as she goes. Her palms strike soil and she rights herself while he is flying forward. The next dagger she pulls gets thrown. Embeds in the bark of a tree beside Chris's head. A clear warning.

Others are picking themselves up. Shaking themselves off. She isn't sure how much longer she can hold them off without causing permanent damage. It's a dilemma.

"Allison," he calls tentatively from the sideline, upset and tense, the only voice that could ever make her turn her back on a loaded gun, live rounds or not. Peripherally, vaguely, she was aware all along that he was there, lurking close by, watching the strife. Wanting to help but not knowing how or who. To her left, Kira is on her feet and coming haltingly at her again, a healthier wariness about her now. But she doesn't angle to face her, brace to fight her, only meets his conflicted gaze and tries not to be torn up inside by the imploring distrust on his face.

The ground starts to shake. Rumbling dangerously from the stirring of power. It brings them all up short. Their feet spread, bracing against the tremble, struggling to stay standing as the earth cracks under their feet, splitting apart at the seams, collapsing into the subterranean web below in patches and tendrils. The witch grows heated, suddenly so much more fervent with her chanting. The entire nexus of energy is awakening with deadly thunderous resound.

"Come along, hunter. I need you now."

* * *

_"Don't do this," she pleads, urging intensely. The ring dagger cuts into her finger as she flips it, held low by her thigh but at the ready. Her breathing is steady and her heart hammering in her ears sharpens the focus. The pain is beating at the glass inside her, beating against its confines, trying to get out and bring her down. She feels it there, across the distance, held at bay by focused numbness. By sheer fucking force of will. She will not let it win. She will not give in._

_But they've already lost._

_Lydia is locked up tight in the madhouse. Everyone else is dead. It's just them left. The last hope. Derek comes at him. Gets thrown clear across the loft. He smashes into the warehouse window and lands rolling out over shards onto the industrial balcony. Scott rushes the shell of his best friend as the alpha is still in the air. Gets knocked out with his face slammed into the iron of the stairs railing. Isaac gets brutalized. He is on his back and bleeding when she makes it there, dragging himself over to prop against the half destroyed beam of a support column. A final showdown with the nogitsune and her invitation is late. She skids in just as the last hunter standing on their side since her dad died raises his gun, aimed for the possessed boy, a hollowed out fetch of himself with sallow skin and blue bruised sunken eyes, cold eyes, evil eyes, and a twisted smile. She isn't willing to accept it, but this is already over, and they all know it._

_Remy is about to shoot when Allison jumps breathlessly into the way, spreading her arms wide, face to face with the demon. She puts her back to the end of a gun and meets the taunting stare of the boy she loves, of the void inside him, keeping distance between them even as she shields him from the aim of her ally, saying fiercely, dangerously, "No." Stuck and hating it. Painfully aware that whoever is holding the gun, he is always the deadliest predator in the room._

_"Caught between a rock and a hard place," he mockingly sympathizes, advancing on the hunters, backing her up toward Remy, who growls at her to get out of his way, to let him put the freak down. Head cocked, dark eyes narrowed, he riles, "You want to kill me so badly, pretty little hunter. But all you can do is protect me. Or say goodbye to Stiles. But you won't do that, will you? You'll never give up on him."_

_"Stiles is gone," Remy argues, straining gruffly to get through to her, his aim unwavering when the muzzle of his gun touches between her shoulder blades, demon having forced her back too far. "He's gone, Argent. Just let me do what we gotta do. You don't have to be here for this."_

_"Yes," she says instead, going calm, going reluctantly cold, "I do."_

_Backed into the man, so very near enough, she spins suddenly on her heel, catching his wrist by both hands and twisting his arm above her head as she turns, dislodging his aim. Before she can get farther than the twirl, she is knocked abruptly out of the way. Shoved at the shoulder with enough force to send her flying. She and the gun go together. The weapon skitters, landing somewhere close when she crashes into a column and hits the floor hard, air shocked out of her body. Frozen there for a crucial moment where she landed. Her vision steadies in time to see the void kill her last hunter. Thrust his hand straight into the man's chest with a stiff punch, his head turned toward her when he pulls out the bloody fist, clutching his heart, and Remy drops heavily onto his knees, his face slack. She screams protest, pushing off the pillar, still pretty much frozen, but it doesn't matter. It doesn't make a damn bit of difference. Those dark eyes find her with false consideration, watching her yell, appreciating her horror._

_She did this. She got him killed. She chose Stiles over them all. And she'll do it again._

_"Come on, little hunter's girl. Come at me. You know you want to. Give it your best shot."_

_Indecisive, she glances between him and the gun on the ground nearby as he silkily provokes her, glances conflictedly at it lying there before sucking in a breath and kicking it aside, sending it sliding into the shadows, and pushes upward to take him on herself. Every hot ache. Every little earthquake. Every uneven heartbeat. Every breath she takes. She needs this. She needs to do this. Or die trying. This monster has taken everything from her, every last thing she had to hold onto, and she needs to get it back. She needs to make him feel it._

_"Oh. There you are," he says, crows darkly in delight when he cants his head and bends his knees just a touch, when he sees the steel and fire in her eyes. The burning ice. "That's it. Let it in."_

_"We're going to kill you."_

_"Not in this body," he archly retorts, eyebrows rising. Takes a step sideways as she comes at him, deflecting the first swing easily, batting away a pest. But she keeps coming. Doesn't slow down and doesn't waste time hesitating between blows, between strikes, spinning and sinking and blocking as she throws everything she has left into him, meaning it to hurt. She lands a jab to the ribcage that steals his breath for a second, gives her the opening to jam her knee up into his hipbone, her fingers digging into the muscle of his shoulder, finding the nerve. He takes her by the throat, hand curving at its side, clutching more at the nape to yank her in close, crushing her body flush against his own to keep her from landing any more frontal blows, hugging her suffocatingly fierce. While he has her, he turns his head into her hair, cheek against cheek and his lips moving at the shell of her ear as his hot breath makes her shiver, whispering madly, "No more crying. No more whining. Just us and this killer instinct of yours. This is what I've been after from you. My favorite hunter."_

_Allison digs a blade into his wrist where he holds her, kicking a heel up into his stomach to vault herself into a backflip and gain distance. She lands and takes a breath, swiping the sleeve of her shirt over her ear to rub the ghost of his touch away, their eyes locking. Her hard mask. His dark smile. The werewolves were fodder for him, their supernatural brute strength nothing to his, but she isn't a werewolf and she doesn't rely on blunt brute force. She has tricks, moves, and the speed and fluidity of training on her side, her body its own honed weapon without the advantages of supernatural edge or retractable talon. And vicious glass insides pushing her._

_"COME ON!" he raves, egging her on._

_The girl goes low, skidding onto one knee to slice the swing the ring dagger around her index as it cuts across his side, spinning up again on her feet behind him, having skipped under his arm when he reached for her. He stumbles forward, grabbing at his ribs as they bleed, black mist seeping free. Jabbing overhanded, she skims the dagger tip across his shoulder as he evades, spinning aside then toward her, and she uppercuts hard before she backs off. For just a millisecond. Twirls to snap a kick backward into his chest and make him slam back against a column. She finishes the rotation as she lunges in, dagger glancing off the concrete a centimeter from his head, nicking his ear when it does, when he dodges an inch and smacks a palm sharp and brutal into her gut. She staggers back without her weapon, gasping in pain, her body seizing at the impact to its fresh almost fatal wound. She has no intention of doing grievous damage to that body, to the body he stole, but she intends to hurt him badly anyway. Hurt him as badly as she can afford without losing Stiles. Except now she can't even catch her breath. Now she can hardly move. The pain tries to shut her body down, tries to get her to stop and retreat, to spare herself, because her body knows the danger it's in, knows if she keeps this up and keeps pushing, she'll probably get herself killed. But she can't listen to her body. She doesn't have the luxury to relent yet. So she goes at him again._

_"Well, that _is_ disappointing!" he comments idly, mildly, sidestepping her thrown punch, her next raised knee and sidekick. Catching her roughly by the throat. Lifting her easily off the ground with a cool expression of losing interest. "You're not up to fighting weight. This isn't fair." She chokes where he holds her, fingers biting into his hand, his wrist, struggling to shove strength back into her legs to have enough power in them to kick free of his grasp and breathe. "Oh, well."_

_There is this second of awareness, of precipice, when she has the feeling that this is really over. No more resisting it. No more denying. No more hanging on by the skin of her teeth, by raw bloodied fingertips dragging helplessly across the grit of cement, because it is just … over._

_And then Isaac is on his feet and standing behind him. Isaac is saving her, latching onto the void from behind, arms around his chest, over his shoulders, all ten wolf talons piercing into him to vice. He jerks him backward with the weight of his own body thrown, of their bodies, and she crashes onto the floor as they go, crying out when her stitches rip. Tears in her eyes, everything is blurry and grey, dark and yet too bright at the same time, but she barely makes out the sight of Stiles wrenching free of the beta. He pulls him forward, reversing their postures, and he snaps his neck with one wrench of his arms. Killing him. Killing Isaac._

_"NO!" she screams out, shuddering into a sob, a yell of ragged grief, of hurt and hatred, as Isaac falls away from him, his eyes open and unseeing. Gritting her teeth, wetness streaking down her face and falling to her chest, her fingertips bite into the floor and hurt when she pushes herself up again. Throws herself at him. Running on pain. On hate. Emotion and adrenaline the only things keeping her body moving. Keeping it from giving out on her when she needs it most._

_Trying to match him hand to hand is harder than anything. He is quick and vicious and bored, his skill unparalleled, but she has the heat of steel and fire driving her, of burning searing agony and ferocity. She keeps up for a second, for a minute, for an hour, she doesn't know, but she beats at him, battering against the void, against the emptiness of evil purely for the sake of evil. Making him feel it for just a moment, for just a heartbeat, even if only slightly. He feels it. Until he snatches her fist out of the air, aimed at his head, pins it there while he takes his other hand and jams long strong fingers right into the fissure of her reopened wound, of the flesh he tore apart with a knife just days before, breaking what survived of the stitches, prying her insides wide with casual savagery._

_And then Allison is staggering back with a strangled gasp, a gargled choking burst of reaction, reeling from the blunt abrupt shock to her system. She doubles over as she staggers, clutching her bloody stomach, coughing up red as she hits her knees. Catches with a palm slapped to the floor to save her face from collision. Looking blearily up beneath fluttering lashes to watch him watching her with that twisted expression as he brings his fingers up, slides one into his mouth, pulls it slowly free as he sucks in her blood. Tasting her horror and hurt and hate._

_"You can't have him," she chokes out._

_The dark spirit only cocks his head again, crouching down to be near her, to be nearly level there. He draws a bloody fingertip shiveringly gentle along the soft curve of her cheek. Caressing lovingly. His eyes make her hurt more than the pain of his fingers digging inside her. Make her cry harder, quieter, because all she sees is what she can't have. "I already do." And then, "I'll have you too." Whatever that means._

_Her expression hardens. Darkens. "Not on your life."_

_Before he can finish her off, or whatever it is he plans to do with her, a chain comes around him from behind and the nogitsune startles. Derek vices it tight, trapping him for as many milliseconds as he can manage while Scott lunges in and stabs a syringe into his neck. A needle full of wolfsbane. Poisoning the void like they planned. Only the plan hadn't meant for Remy to die. Or for Isaac to die. God, she doesn't know how she's going to tell Ava. But sleight of hand isn't so easy to pull over on a dark fox. The original trickster. Misdirection doesn't come without cost. But they manage in the end, sliding the syringe in, depressing the fluid into his veins, injecting the poison into his bloodstream. That special strand of wolfsbane that targets the void. Written cryptically in Deaton's journals and painstakingly decoded by the hunter's girl after hours on hours of slaving through it. The Hail Mary. Debilitating the devil within for the moment without harming the boy he stole to buy them the time they need to find a solution of more permanence._

_He falls slowly to his knees, black veins rising to press varicose to pale skin as he draws in a dry searing breath, crystal dark eyes rolling back into his head. He drops onto his side, not so far away from where she collapses herself, and Allison reaches out with the last of her fast fading strength, furled fingers finding his own. Letting the darkness swallow her whole._

* * *

Kira isn't the threat that she thinks she is. The baby fox is quick and has a few fancy moves, she'll grant her that, but lacks the hard-won strength and viciousness the hunter has in spades. When she tries to stop her from reaching the witch, Allison has to hurt her. She steps into a kick, catching the Asian's leg by her calf, wrenching it in a twirl of motion as her other arm stiffens out and slams a palm flat into her pelvis, able to dislocate the hip and throw the waifish teenager back as she lets go. Positioned where she wants her, she doesn't give her but a nanosecond to recover, kicking out and landing a foot hard in her center of gravity to send Kira sailing backward down into the newly formed chasm she teetered ahead of.

Then it is just Stiles standing in her way. With a quiet but powerful, "Don't go."

With both Scott and Isaac still down, Derek is hanging back, clutching his mangled shoulder, sharing undecided glances with Chris, who lets his rifle loll from its brace, not taking a new shot. They don't want to go up against her. They don't want her to be their enemy. And they definitely don't want to hurt her. The offensive was halfhearted to begin with. But now as the earth trembles and the witch swirls a windstorm of quivering power around the clearing that vibrates at the very night air with perceptible colors, and Allison is not backing down, the task has become … unclear. Their last resort is a human boy stepping shakily into her way when she turns and tries to step up onto the nemeton.

"Get out of my way, Stiles."

"I can't do that," he tells her, sounding almost apologetic.

Jaw clenched, she brings her last knife up toward his throat. They are five feet apart. It isn't an actual threat. It's a warning. "_Get out of my way_. I don't want to hurt you. But I will."

"You can't do this," he counters, refusing to step aside. "You know what will happen."

"I do."

"You know what feeding this thing will do. If you care about any of us at all—"

"You aren't mine," she cuts him off, sharper and fiercer than she intended. More revealing as she takes a sudden step forward, blade still held against her forearm, wrist crooked, ready to cut. "I don't owe you anything!"

"You're right," he placates, pausing to swallow and nod, to inhale a grave breath. "You're right. You don't." He takes a step this time, takes an unsteady step toward her, not flinching away from the edge of the blade held level to his neck. He walks nearly right into it, bringing them closer so she can see his eyes better, so she can meet his penetrating stare and struggle to stay cold with it. Voice lowered, he agrees, "You don't owe us anything."

Glancing anxiously over his shoulder at the witch, at her work, knowing time is running out, she pushes her arm forward, pushes across that last bit of distance between his vulnerable throat and the cutting edge of her dagger. Steel touches skin and he doesn't move, doesn't tear his eyes off of hers, resolved and unwavering despite his nerves. Her voice is less harsh than she wants it, less even as she admits, "I'm sorry about this. I wish there was another way, I do, but there isn't." And as the witch urges impatiently, she pushes another step toward the nexus, forcing him to go with her, stepping backward at the mercy of the blade.

"But you know you don't have to do this." He starts talking faster now. "I know you want to get back home. I know you want to fix things. Maybe— Maybe you were supposed to end up here. I mean, nobody is left over there, right? You said so. You said you've got no one. They're all gone. And we're all here. Everybody is still here. The only one— The only one we've lost is you."

"Enough, Stiles. It's over. Stop trying."

But he doesn't stop. "So maybe that means something. Yeah?" He keeps imploring. _Pressuring_. "That can't mean nothing. Can it?" She is tempted by his arguments. They can see it. They can see her struggle, her resolve wavering as pain and the fear of hope tear at her, making her unsteady as he tries to talk her down with all he's got. _He_ can see it. He can see the affect his words are having as he says them, as the soft hurry of his voice invades her icy shell, his low intensity infecting her. "Maybe you were meant to be here, Allison. Maybe you're supposed to stay."

And it is a close thing. A dangerously close thing threatening to break her determination as he taps into the weakness in her, into that weak longing _want_ for something good, for a kind of hope. For the things he hints at to be possible. But it isn't. It can't be. She doesn't deserve anything but this short path. This is her redemption. Her future. Her end. The only thing that matters is saving her family. Saving them all. Even if it condemns these innocent others. Ultimately, she goes hard, shutting him out. Turning cold.

"Move," she says strongly, quietly, clearly the last warning he will get.

He gives up. Eases reluctantly out of her way.

The world is about to come apart at its seams. And it is all her doing.

Allison steps up onto the nemeton, rumbling with impatience as if a living sentient creature, arm falling to her side, still clutching restlessly at the dagger. Joins the waiting witch in the core of a razed oak with a deep determined breath. Power is cloying up here. Even more choking so close. It swirls like a dizzying breeze about them, whipping at her with its touch, invisible but palpable, so very sickeningly palpable. It is eating at her stronger than it had the first time she did this spell with a whole coven of witches to dissipate its excess. To temper the storm of awakening a nexus. Drawing on a sinkhole of unimaginable darkness. Of wild magic. Ancient magic.

All around the clearing are the faces of all that she loves. Mirrors of every single person she is doing this for. Everything she has sacrificed to put things right again. But they don't understand. They feel betrayed. Backed into a corner. They tried to stop her. Tried and failed. Because they didn't want to hurt her, to hurt the baby she carries inside of her that she's dooming alongside herself, like she's dooming them too, dooming them to be left behind in the wreckage she leaves with her wake.

God, she wishes there was another way. She wishes…

But _no_. This is it. Last resort.

Barely resisting the urge to run, to collapse onto her knees and dry heave, gripping at bark to bite into her nerveless fingertips as she tries futilely to hold onto something while the world tips off kilter all around her, spinning madly out of control, she stays standing still, stiff with control, with perseverance, and she hands the dagger slowly over. Offers out her arm, sleeve tugged up, exposing the soft white flesh of her inner forearm for the witch to slice into, drawing the blood that must be spilt. Looking down, she blinks thickly through her vertigo, breathing with her nose, one breath, two breaths, three breaths to keep from swaying weakly, and watches the slow motion drop of red falling to the tree, to the razed stump of an uncontrollable fixture, a well of volatility those before her thought they could control too, believed they could dampen by chopping away its physical representation, which only served in making the source all that more unpredictable. She watches her blood fall to the nexus, feels the surge in strength, in hunger and need and void, roaring breathtakingly up and outward the second it tastes crimson. Tastes her life force. And she feels its potency clearer than ever, her connection to it revitalizing as it feeds off what she offers, sensing its urgency, knowing what will happen any minute now. Any second.

Until Stiles…

"Lydia isn't here!" he shouts after her, jarring her from distraction, from a haze of dark magic, calling for her attention as he fights against the repelling push of the tree and its pulsating wall of a perimeter, hovering urgently at the edge of the nemeton. "She wouldn't come." Vehemently tall, refusing to be driven back like the others, instead staying stubbornly there behind her, his voice a stern insinuating reminder thrumming resolutely through the swirl. "You know why?" He pauses only a split second, watching her head turn, angling toward the sound of him, not quite looking over her shoulder, not wanting to see his face. "She wouldn't be a part of this." Fingers furling into her palm as it shakes, as everything shakes, she struggles to block him out. "She said she wouldn't help us stop you." The nexus hums hungrily and the world is swiveling like it's having a seizure and her blood just keeps dripping. "No matter what it costs us, she wasn't going to hurt you by making you stay!" The world is coming apart at the seams and Stiles is still there, still shouting up at her over the noise, refusing to desert her like the others, all backpedalling for safety in horror. But not him. Not this boy who doesn't even know her, doesn't even care about her, who can never be who she needs him to be. "_Allison_! Don't do this!"

_Don't do this. Don't do this. Don't do this._ So many voices warring in her head. _You've always known, Ally._

"Shut up," she mutters cursedly under her breath, eyes squeezed shut, nails digging at her fist, staggering to stay braced while the world quakes violently against the domineering unnaturalness of the witch's manipulations. Cursing him for all the conflict she feels. "Shut up, shut up, shut up." She can't do this. She can't change her mind. Eyes finding the witch, she says sternly, "Do it."

"Allison!"

_Goddamn it_, she thinks tiredly, heartbrokenly, gaining viciousness thinking specifically of him, _Goddamn you_.

Mercy is still holding her arm stretched over the core, prying her blood free, making sure it keeps flowing as she chants and chants, her incantation fervor and frenetic as magic twines about its echoes in the air. The hunter hangs her head, eyes screwed shut again, sucking in a harsh gasp to shove it out hard from her body. The spell culminates in that second, a bright white burst of an ageless power exploding outward from the nexus they stand on, a tidal wave washing over them, nearly knocking her off her feet. But she fights through the pressure, keeping where she stands, pushing her body forward against the momentum, against the resistance, falling into its taut grip, letting it seize her into the storm until she can't breathe.

There is no thought. No tangible plan of action. There is only the gravely panicked realization of shifting decisions. It happens in a blink. In a single heartbeat. There is a lull in current, a lapsed unbearable force shoving him backward as the magic comes together around the core of its nexus, comes together like the eye of a storm tightening around Allison. And in that sudden buckling of the crushing restraint battering against him, Stiles is moving before he can stop himself, before he even knows what the hell he's doing. All there is in the disorienting chaos is the driving instinct of his body pushing swiftly forward, of reflex throwing him up onto the stump, crashing recklessly at the center of the havoc. There is the rushing and the vibrating and the deafening hum and there is distantly the sound of Scott calling his name from too far away, yelling _NO!_ at him way too late to do any good, and then he is hitting the hunter's girl from the side, arms going around her as they collide and go flying. Tackling her through the overwhelming whiteness.

And then it's over. Just like that. Just like that, their world comes apart, falling back into ruin. Just like that, everything is different, and nothing will ever be the same again.

* * *

TBC


	9. need me

.

**IF YOU MUST**

**need me**

* * *

It was the guilt. It has to be. He caused Allison's death. He'll never forgive himself for that. And he can never take that back. Which is why he felt so obligated by the other, so urgently and impossibly unable to stand by and watch her ruin everything left, watch her go all suicidal hunter to fix the past. There is no changing the past. Stiles knows this better than anyone. Every day has been a reminder of that. He can't go back. He can't fix what he did. He can't ever make it right but he can do right by this one, by this other Allison, and he can do everything in his power to make sure she gets the chance her original never got. Because of him.

That's why he did it. Why he tackled her into the nexus. That's gotta be why.

"Oh. God."

"Idiot," she slurs, shoving at him, rolling herself onto her back. "You idiot!"

They wake up. Together. Where? Someplace they shouldn't be. When? Good question. But all that really matters right now is the sound of wolves howling in the distance and the frost on dirt a dark woods has to offer in the middle of the night. Stranded. His head is still a little jumbled from the jump, he thinks, not quite able to string coherent thoughts together the way he could before. But he feels. Feels the cold bite against his skin, feels the soft warmth of her skin on his skin when she first lands on top of him, before he opens his eyes and realizes what went wrong.

"You shouldn't be here."

"Neither should you!" he snaps, catching her arm before she can leave him there.

She is sitting upright in the iced leaves, in the hard soil, looking over at him with something akin to horror on her face. Saying gravely, "You shouldn't be here." And then she tries to get up. Tries to leave him. His fingers reach out and wrap around her upper arm before she makes it far, pulling her back down. This is all wrong. This is awful. The world feels alien. _Off_ somehow. So his paranoia and panic doesn't register as unwarranted in his confused state. He holds onto her arm, even when she shoots a fuzzy but pointed glance at where his fingers are bruising. The howling is getting louder, getting closer, a commotion in the forest.

"Where are we?"

"Not where we're supposed to be," she answers absently, her eyes scanning the surroundings, recovering from the blinding light by adjusting to the darkness.

"Okay. But I think we should go now."

Allison looks at him, really looks at him, absorbing the distraction of his expression, the worry and anxiety, and he feels her focus zeroing in, shaking off the embers of nonsensical scatterbrain. He wishes he could do that. He can't seem to figure out how to think properly. But he knows that he should listen when she clambers painstakingly to her feet, his grip on her arm unrelenting and urging him up with her, and she says sternly, "We should run."

"Yeah. Probably."

Suddenly, her fingers latch harshly around his wrist, prying his off her arm, keeping her clutch as she wrenches him along. "_Now_. We need to run. Now." And then they are staggering messily up out of a deep ravine, catching at dirt and tree roots to help them forward against that steep slope. Running through the woods in the dark from wolves on the hunt. Most likely Hale werewolves, because he is beginning to recognize markers, recognize these woods.

He trips. It isn't the first time, but instead of jerking him up without stopping now, she goes with him as he stumbles through it, falling sideways from the ridge of a cove, sliding gracelessly down into the depths of a levee. She takes him by the lapels of his overshirt and wrenches him in, collapsing backward together against its softer wall, finding shelter below the arcing tangle of its tree root and loam canopy. They wait there, hidden almost entirely from the moon's silver touch, praying to not be noticed, his back to the dirt and hers to his chest, four knees brought up tight, his arms clasped unconsciously around her as they pant for breath. The galloping vibrations of so many sets of paws pounding into the earth. The rumbling of growls and howls then the ripping and rending that comes with it. Those sounds are so close. Too close. They carry on the night air, on the dark quiet, but they are still so freaking close. An alarming violence.

"It's okay. It's okay," he is murmuring thoughtlessly in her ear, convincing himself.

Softly, solemnly, she disagrees, "No. It's not."

"You're right. They'll hear us. They'll smell us. Oh, God. We're gonna get eaten."

"Stiles, stop." He doesn't realize his grip on her as tightened, seizing painfully so that she can't really breathe, until she elbows him in the gut, startling him from his danger haze. As he loosens, she twists her upper half to face him, slapping a palm over his mouth to shut him up. In the dark, he can barely see her eyes staring up at him, but he does, and he gets stuck.

They wait with bated breath, listening to the pounding and animal resonance, aggressive wolf noises as they hunt nearby, as they fight each other over prey. It lasts a long time, an unbearably long time, it seems, whether the reality is briefer or not, but eventually the pack does move on, heading farther west towards the rougher terrain. After awhile of silence, of stillness, she takes her palm from his mouth, moving slowly, eyes locked, breathing finally calmed. Another moment like that goes by, heartbeats hammering in the hush, less frantic than before but still thumping heavy. Then she grabs his hand and pulls him out from under the ditch. Into the moonlight.

"Let's go."

* * *

The year is 2005. And so many things are different here. They do a little haphazard recon once they make it out of the woods, being careful to not be seen, before she deems it too dangerous to stay on the street right now and leads him in the back way to a roach motel. They have to jimmy open the tiny bathroom window of an empty room and crawl through because neither thought to bring along a credit card and it wouldn't work anyway because the people attached to their names here are middle schoolers. She came prepared, with a wad of cash in her pocket, but is saving that for more important things. And she came prepared with weapons, all she really needed strapped by various holsters, but she used up every last blade on her confrontation with him and his people and now she is barehanded. She closes the drapes tight and flips the magnetic security latch and keeps the lights off, and after some awkwardly sitting around with each other, not knowing what to say, what to think, what to do, she tells him to stay put and shimmies herself back out the way they came in. An hour later, she comes back with two bags, one full of crappy prepackaged food and the other with new clothing. She tells him to eat before she locks herself in the bathroom and turns on the shower. When she comes out again, hair wet and a towel tied tight around her body, she sits down beside him on the bed, letting the silence be awkward and telling.

"So," he starts unsurely, still at a loss, even after the disorientation from the shift has worn off. "What's the plan? What're we going to do?" And half expects her to retort something harsh like, "We? There is no _we_. You're an uninvited tagalong. You're on your own." But she doesn't say that. She doesn't say anything at all. She doesn't have a retort, harsh or otherwise, because she doesn't have an answer yet. Not one she is sure of. Which is obvious from her silence, from her sidelong glance of dark secretive hazel eyes, her pretty face tired and indecipherable.

When she finally does say something, she only tells him to get some rest. He'll need it. But he doesn't trust her. Not enough to actually sleep.

_"Did you mean what you said?"_ he remembers her asking when they first sat down side by side, uncomfortably adjusting to what has happened, to their new situation. Before she got up and left him all alone. Remembers the way her voice sounded, softly quiet and almost like it didn't matter, holding so much beneath the surface. _"At the nemeton. About me belonging there."_ Remembers it as he stirs from dozing to find her slipping out the door without him. _"Yeah. I meant it."_ He climbs cautiously from bed. Gets up to follow. _"I am sorry, you know."_

Not sure what she means to do, why she is leaving him, he keeps his distance, staying back as far as he can without losing her in the dark. Trails her to a parking lot. Catches her hotwiring a car with a stolen pocket knife. She stiffens when he slides suddenly into the passenger seat just as she gets the ignition to spark and the engine turns over.

"What are you doing?" she asks, her voice doing that hollow hunter thing again.

"Going with you. Where are we going?"

"Get out," she says, pointedly _not_ shifting the car into gear.

"Consider me your sidekick," he counters lightly, firmly, "I'm a good sidekick."

Jaw clenched, she grounds impatiently, "I'm not taking you with me."

"You're not leaving me behind, Argent. This is your world. Your turf. You can't just desert me. What do _I_ know about this place?"

"I was gonna come back," she argues, and he watches the way her fingers tighten on the wheel as she says it, as if she isn't sure herself whether it's truth or fiction.

"Now you don't have to."

Softened now, she tells him, "You don't wanna be with me when I do this, Stiles."

"Do what?" he asks, already probably knowing the answer. "Where is it we're going?"

Allison turns toward the windshield, sighing deeply as she fists the gearshift and shoves it up, stepping onto the accelerator, easing the commandeered car out of the lot onto the empty street. "Home," she replies simply, after a poignant hesitation. She doesn't mean his home, his timeline, and he knows this is gonna be bad, so he sinks back into his seat and huffs out a heavy breath as his fingers find the handhold on the passenger door, squeezing until the skin goes white and pain sharpens his determination. Just a little bite, but it's enough, and it keeps him steady.

The drive is a long one. It takes them all night and half of the next day. He offers to drive and keeps offering until she threatens him with the cigarette lighter as they're leaving Nevada. He falls asleep with his cheek flattened to the window glass and a foot up on the dashboard while dawn is creeping across the horizon, coloring black and blue into orange and pink. He fights it as long as he can manage but she isn't very invigorating company, refusing to talk, rolling her eyes at every new station he chooses on the radio, adopting the demeanor of a cold mute block of a brick wall. By the time he wakes up, she is pulling the car to a curb, slowing to a crawl, and the sun is watery but too far west for it to not be the middle of the afternoon.

"We're here," she says softly, watching him pick himself up off the window and swipe a hand over his mouth in case of drool, groggy and stiff as hell.

"Where is here?"

"A suburb in southern Montana."

"This is where your family…" He trails off, following her gaze as her head turns and she points her finger casually toward a house a few spaces down the block. The garage door is propped open as a woman with dirty blonde hair drags a little brunette out onto the lawn, hauling her by an arm despite obvious heartfelt protests. "Jesus. You're just a kid."

"Eleven," she specifies, her eyes on the woman, not the little girl. This is the base her family were operating out of in 2005. They were here on a skinwalker hunt. She remembers the blood as her dad came home, his men carrying Uncle Tommy in and dropping him onto the kitchen island, scattering appliances all over the floor, his guts spilling out of his stomach from massive gashes in oversized talon marks. And she tells him this with a cool offhanded tone, her gaze fixed on Kate, her fingers rubbing absently up and down the length of her leg as the denim scratches at her skin, restless restraint in that language. "This is the first year she started training me."

"Do you have a plan? Allison. Tell me you have a plan. You can't just walk up in broad daylight and do … whatever it is you're thinking of doing. You have to have a plan—"

"Stay in the car," she interrupts, not acting like she heard him. "Don't watch this."

But he can't do that. He can't let her just… Because that's crazy. That is freaking insane. So as she climbs out and starts striding resolvedly forward, he leaps out after her. Chases the girl down the sunny sidewalk as her deranged aunt throws punches at the tiny delicate pretty little kid that is her younger self, forcing that tiny delicate thing to dodge and duck and block strikes that look like they'll break her arm when they impact. _Training her_, she'd said. He can't help but feel sick at the sight, knowing what he knows about their history, about their future. But he has _his_ Allison to worry about. The slightly possibly psycho 19-year-old about to do something rash in the front yard of her childhood house.

"Wait," he calls, barely remembering at the last second he can't just go shouting out her name so close to the other her. "Listen. Just wait." But she doesn't stop, doesn't falter, so he rushes and practically crashes into her from behind, from the side, locking his arm around her waist when he collides with her, pulling her off the sidewalk into a neighboring yard, falling hard into the grass with her behind the perfectly trimmed hedges of sharp needlepoint holly bushes. Stabbing them accidentally by a thousand little daggered leaf edges until he rolls onto his side, hefting her over him while she struggles, pinning her down beside him, his back to the hedges and his front to her, a paltry barrier between her and her spectacularly awful impulsivity.

"Get off me!"

"I can't do that."

"Don't make me hurt you."

"Please don't." He pushes her back down as she rises. "Just hold on a second, okay?"

Dangerously, she goes still, her expression brutally hard, and warns him, "If you don't back off in the next three seconds—"

Something happens. He isn't sure what. All of a sudden, everything darkens, losing its solidity. The world starts spinning again, going bright and blurry as it swirls like a carousal on speed trying to buck them off. They cling to the grass, cling for gravity, but vertigo gets them fierce. The sun is too bright, flashing like a solar flare, and then everything pitches to an end. It gets abruptly still, perfectly still, and then eerily silent, a normal darkness of nighttime with a pinch of moonlight in the mix for illumination replacing the afternoon Montana sky, a dark dank room of grungy white tiled walls and a rusty barred window replacing the open outdoors. After a moment frozen, he is breathing again and coming to his senses, brain working to adjust to new surroundings, and lets her go. Climbs shakily to his feet off a moldy ceramic floor. Recognizes this dark derelict place as painfully horribly familiar.

Echo House.

But it isn't right. It's different. So similar, so exactly the same, but _something_ about it is off. Even before he hears _her_ voice, before he turns and sees her strapped at the wrists to a dirty cot, her beautiful strawberry hair knotted and greasy, her sallow face completely blank. Drugged out. So he crouches down to her immediately, kneeling in front of her. Takes that face in his hands. Tries to be a calmly authoritative counterweight to the unstable weirdness of this world. "Lydia? Lydia, look at me. Do you know who I am?"

"You're not supposed to be here," she says in a dull voice, her eyes unfocused, aimed up over his head somewhere. "You're dead. You're all dead."

"Stiles," he hears Allison gently try to pull his attention, her hand landing on his shoulder as she stands at his back. "This isn't your Lydia. This is mine. Who is crazy as a loon."

"Excuse me?" said loon retorts, but what should be arch affront sounds like dull daze.

"No offense," the brunette mutters, her pale graceful fingers coming into sight as she reaches out and dusts a nasty lock of red hair from an unseeing green eye, a casually affectionate touch of intimate familiarity that startles him until he figures that the side of this girl he knows is the side she reserves for strangers, for untrustworthy anomalies, and not for friends, for her loved ones. Those people she is doing all of this for. Giving her life for.

Suddenly, unfocused green eyes get sharp and shift past him, fixing on Allison's stomach as her hand drops away from the redhead. "You're pregnant."

"Yeah. It's a real miracle," she drawls dryly, fingers digging in where they sit on his shoulder, an insistent demand. Trying to force him off his knees and backward without actually wrenching at him yet. He won't budge. Ignores her commanding touch.

"But you're dead."

"Not yet," she counters, a mildness about her that makes him wonder.

Those green eyes go to Stiles. "You're dead. You're all dead." There is less dullness about her. Beginning to be a fervent edge infusing her from her tranquilized stupor. A provocation starting to sear through the muddled haze of antipsychotics she is pumped full of. "You died. You died. This isn't right. You're dead. You're all dead. You're NOT SUPPOSED TO BE HERE!"

"_Stiles_," Allison bites harshly through gritted teeth, yanking him up away from the banshee a split second before she starts screaming bloody murder so shrilly loud that it feels like his ears are about to bleed and the window should be shattering.

The door bursts wide and a pair of white-clad orderlies are rushing in. At the very same time, everything around them begins to swivel. That stark shininess starts solar flaring at the edges of his eyes. He knows what comes next. Feels panicked, urgent and terrified and about to hurl when he is snatched by the arms and hauled out into the corridor, kicking and struggling against those manhandling holds on him, separating him from Allison. Déjà vu hits so hard, he all but loses it. Jamming a foot into the nearest doorjamb, he forces them to a stop. Glances over his shoulder to see the hunter fighting off the extra help. She snaps a wrist, headbutts a nose, plants a heel onto a braced thigh and stepladders her other leg around a neck to flip the man down to the floor as she locks her calves and twists her hips, and then is popping up and running down the hall for him, dodging capture from the orderly that lets him go to turn and take her in, ducking down below his arm as it swings for her, sliding toward him, stretching out her arm, her hand, her fingertips toward Stiles when the man snatches her from behind, holding her back those last few inches of distance between them as the world goes white.

He lands on top of her in the woods. She falls backward from her skinned knees as he topples forward when the taut rubber band pressure of gravity snaps back into place and knocks them off. As her back smacks to the ground, kicking up a pile of dewy autumn foliage, and he crashes heavy atop her, bashing the air from her lungs with a grunt, a wince, she reaches up and her fingers find the folds of his jacket on instinct, clenching in its material, in the lean breadth of his shoulders as they recover. The woods are close, dark spindly trees all around, but the soil is thin beneath them and they are lying out in the open, a clear view of the starry night sky, of the fat ripe silver moon, peripheral glimpses of the town skyline twinkling in the distance.

"Were we touching?" she asks importantly, once she gets her breath back.

"What?" he drags out.

"_Were we touching_? When it happened. When we shifted."

When she gives him a shove, he lands on his back in the leaves beside her. "You think if we're not touching when it happens, we won't stay together? Like one of us will be dumped somewhere else from the other? Or one will be left behind?"

"I think _you'll_ be left behind," she replies, looking tiredly up at the sky, not ready to move yet. "I'm the only one anchored here. You're just along for the ride."

Propping on his elbow, he looks seriously down at her. Worried. "What are you saying?"

But she just sighs. Says softly with a shake of her head, eyes still on the sky, "I don't know."

"Well, is this supposed to be happening? All this shifting? Should we really be jumping around so much? How do you expect to get anything done like this?"

"No," she bites, sharpening suddenly. The look she shoots him is searing. "This isn't supposed to be happening."

"Something went wrong."

"_Of course_ it did," she snaps, swinging upright so fast he has to throw himself back to avoid a bloody nose. "The spell was tailored for _me_, with _my_ blood fueling its structure, so of course you barreling into the middle of things screwed up the magic. I was supposed to be in Montana with Kate and my eleven-year-old self. I wasn't supposed to be jumping back to the present with Lydia. And who the hell knows where we are now?!"

"Okay. Calm down. We'll work it out."

"What is with this _we_?" she demands, whirling around to face him after she put her back up. "There wasn't supposed to be a _we_ here. You weren't supposed to follow me."

Purposely dense, he pushes to his feet and questions, "You mean from the motel?"

"I mean into the nexus!" she yells, losing her cool. Looking a lot less dangerous to his health than her usual icy disinterest makes her seem, even with as mad as she is now. "You've ruined it. You've changed everything. My plan is useless. I can't leave you here, I can't take you with me." She turns roughly away again, running a hand through her hair, pushing the wild raven tresses out of her face and huffing out a harsh breath as she looks off the edge of a cliff. They're up high on the bluffs again, back where they started, where they always start, deep in the wooded hills. And the dark. "If I leave you in this timeline, only God knows what damage you could do just by existing where you shouldn't. You'd put _my_ Stiles at risk. And if I take you with me, not only will you _keep_ getting in my way, but you'll endanger the whole thing. I'm going to have to find a way to fix this side effect of the spell. Then I'm going to have to find a way to get you home."

"That'd be preferable," he mentions lightly, not coming any closer.

"I don't know how I'm going to do that," she adds, voice lilting pointedly.

"We'll figure something out," he assures with easy assertion, not feeling it at all.

On an odder note, a sudden swift change in direction, she rotates around to pin him in place with a tilted head and an expectant expression, her eyes catching his, searching him for answers. "Why did you?"

Nervously, warily, he shifts his feet, stuffs his hands in his pockets, resisting the urge to start walking backward, start retreating to safety. "Why did I what?"

"Follow me through the nexus."

"I don't know. I guess I didn't think." But that doesn't answer her question. He knows that. Just because it wasn't a clear thought doesn't mean there wasn't a reason. _Something_ made him jump her in that storm. Made him risk everything. It was stupid. It was a really stupid thing to do. He regrets it. But he had a reason. And at the time, it felt like a good one, whether he can explain it to her or not. "Maybe I didn't want you to have to face it alone."

"Maybe," she says softly, agreeably, accepting it as enough.

"Are you—" He stops, unsure how to say it, how to ask. Looks down tellingly at her stomach. "Is everything okay?"

"Fine," she answers, shoving brusquely past him. Heading for the road.

It's been awhile now that she has been showing. Not outrageously so, but definitely noticeably since a week or two after everyone found out. And it has been getting harder and harder each day to keep his eyes away from it, away from the undeniable evidence, from the reality, because every time he looks at her, _really_ looks at her, he gets confused again. Deeply _deeply_ confused about all of this. So to have to stand there and watch them attack her, stand there and watch Scott and Kira go after her, Derek and her own father, and know that _technically_ it was right, despite how so very wrong it all felt, and he never felt so torn. So lost for what to do.

He still feels it. Paralyzed.

"I'm worried," he tells her, confessing without preamble, making her stop her walk. He stares at her back as she stills, hands going hesitantly into the pockets of her jacket, waiting for him to explain himself. He swallows and breathes in and then tries. "I'm worried about you. I'm worried I'll never see my dad again. That I'll never see Scott or Lydia. I'm worried about what you're going to do. About what will happen to you." As he talks, confesses lowly, she just stands there with her back still turned to him, her head just slightly turned so he can see a sliver of her profile while she listens to him, absorbing his words with a resigned type of sobriety. He senses her calmness from here and knows it's the defeated kind. And so he has to admit, "I'm afraid."

Allison waits a minute, standing there in the dark in the deafening silence, an empty waiting quiet as he wishes her to say something. To do something. And what she does is turn her head and look back at the boy. Breathes softly out, "Me too."

Confidence put aside for the moment, purposeful obliviousness shelved, he finally finds voice to what they've both been glaringly _not_ thinking. "We're not getting out of this, are we?"

"I don't know." But then, after looking off, her grave dark eyes come back to him, locking onto his crystalline stare, his appealing vulnerable focus on her, she angles her body towards his with a shift in expression, solemn defeat firming to the quiet strength of serious resolve. "There is a lot I don't know yet." And then, "What happened to me," she says, pausing poignantly, hazel eyes full of adamant promise, "I won't let that happen to you. I won't, okay?"

"Okay," he says back, only a little shakily, nodding his faith in that, in her.

"Let's get out of here." She turns again, starting down the road. "Find out the date."

Stiles follows after, his feet clumsy as they stumble distractedly down the incline, catching up to her. They get halfway down the first tier, a wide dirt lane curving around the protrusion of rock dividing up the foothills, before a faint glimmering turns his attention. He hesitates, faltering to a stop as he makes out the cast of a small campfire through the thin grouping of trees separating its winding precipice from the road. A subtle rushing in his ears warning him they aren't long for this time and place, wherever they are, because twice now he's had that pressure in his ears and twice now they've been displaced. But the glimmer turns out to be a firefly beacon, beckoning him onto the long outcropping of a bluff laden with tree coverage, a gentle rhythm of relaxed murmuring drawing him closer. He puts a forgetful touch to the girl's arm when he first stills, catching her attention too, making her stop, forcing her to follow when he lets the glimmer lure him in.

_"I don't want you to go."_

_"You never do. But I always come back. Don't I?"_

_"Until you don't come back. It only takes the once."_

_"Stiles_…_"_

_"I know. I know. You have to go."_

_"And you have to stay."_

They see her younger self with his. Tangled together in the distance, lazing on a red blanket in a sloping cove of the hill down below their edge, a firelight crackling sedately beside their spread. Watching the stars. His arm is locked loosely around her, going over her shoulder from behind, his hand resting on her hip, her leaned back against him, clutching lightly at the arm holding her, his chin on her crown as she rests her temple to his throat. It is quiet and casual, a sweet peaceful moment from the past, not forgotten but yet so far away that it feels like it happened to someone else entirely, even though she can remember dozens of moments just like this one. Hundreds. Tucked precariously between all the brutal deaths and heartbreak and violence.

Surprised, Stiles turns his head to look at her, his clear eyes finding her face in the shadows as their doppelgängers remain oblivious beneath them, lying together under the night sky. She sets her sight on them down there and can't look away, but her expression smoothes, feeling his gaze fixed on her, standing right beside her, surprised by what he sees. After a second, she reaches out, grasping onto his forearm, and tries to pull him away. Tries to pull back. But his feet won't budge and so she doesn't move either. Stuck together, staring over the edge. Listening to his alternate as he drops his mouth against her ear and whispers plans for the future. For _their_ future. A morbid ritual they used to do every time she was needed elsewhere, called away on dire hunter business, possibly to never return. He would ask her not to go. She would say she had to. He would tell her that they were going to graduate high school if it killed them, that they would find a college dumb enough to take both of them, and they would have lives outside of hunting and protecting town, outside of werewolves and banshees and magic trees. That they would get married once they both got all the wild dormitory experimentation days out of their system, and they would adopt a baby, and everything would be really super boringly normal. And she would lie there listening to him and all his plans, a sad knowing smile on her lips, and sometimes a wet shine in her eyes, but he never saw it because she always had her head on his chest where he couldn't watch the hopeless indulgence form on her tired face. And she doesn't tell the Stiles standing beside her any of this. But he sees it. He sees enough. Too much.

The younger Stiles straightens out his crooked knee and sidles his body, following down on top of her when the younger Allison sinks slowly onto her back on the blanket underneath him, falling flat to look up at him, her legs spreading and bending to hug his hips, bracketing his waist, her hand dragging down his bowed back. And even in the dark, even from here, his other self can see something amazing. Something unnerving and intriguing and upsetting and endearing that he doesn't know how he feels about. He can see his love for her. His easy devotion. A profound thing. Plainly written in his eyes, on his face, in the way his body reacts to hers, the way it communicates inextricably with hers. The soft words, calm but so fervent with meaning and emotion, subdued in the familiarity of old wounds.

"I'm afraid," she whisperingly reveals, just for him, fingers grasping at his dark hair.

"Me too," he says softly, sweetly, and his arms tighten around her, ghosting his nose along her jaw before he buries his head in her curls, in the curve of her neck. Muffled, lighter in weight now, he amends, "But I like it here. Right here with you. Everything will work out."

"Liar."

"You make me happy, Ally." He lifts his head to look at her, eyes searching her face, sighing as he senses her gravity, her darkness. "With everything that's happened, I feel good because of you. I've _survived_, because of you. Is that a lie?"

The girl leans up. Kisses him gently. Then thoroughly. Her arms snake around his shoulders and twist tight together as he presses down onto her firmer. Trapping him there as he traps her. His hands are on her hips, sliding beneath her shirt, kneading soft flesh, beginning to push it up, about to take it off, when the Stiles overhead takes a sharp step backward, wrenching his focus off the lovers on the ledge below.

Several vital things happen at once. His foot lands hard on the ground behind him, lands on a twig or a branch or something brittle that snaps loudly under his weight, and the Allison with him jerks her guarded gaze off the skyline, jerks it to him with urgent reprimand flashing in its depths. The couple below startle apart, her other self asking dangerously, "Did you hear that?" And as this happens suddenly, a glimmer sparks up again and the rushing in his ears gets ferocious, their time having officially run out. The ground beneath them wavers, quaking like a natural disaster again, and the night brightens blindingly. It happens faster now. Gives them less warning. Just as he hits the twig or branch or something brittle, dizzy transition pitches, shoving them forward.

"_Allison_!"

In the whiteness, all he knows is the violent flip of his stomach heaving up toward his throat, the shaky way his equilibrium does somersaults, and the sudden sharp pain in his hand when she snatches it from his side, clenching her own around it harshly enough to break bone. Bruising and unpleasant and a wonderful relief when panic seizes him just as sharply as the world destabilizes. Just as quickly as it starts, it stops, leaving them standing somewhere else. Sometime else. _Sick_. Each shift may get faster than the last, but the strain on his head and his stomach only gets worse. And the campfire in the distance is a rusted barrel filled with flames set in the sand of a clearing. Abruptly. Jarringly. They are in the trees at the edge of it. The lowland woods. On the opposite end of town than the bluffs. On the opposite outskirts. Near the quarry.

"Stiles," she says softly, exhaustedly, alerting him enough to turn towards her, to look for her, just as her hand lets go of his and her legs collapse out from under her. He catches her hurriedly by the waist before she can drop too far, keeping her up, slumped against him. Her head falls back at the neck and her eyes flutter tiredly as she struggles for breath, struggles to recover, swaying in dizzy nausea. In weakness. And he knows how she feels.

But they have bigger problems when a scream rings out through the night.

She can't be more than twelve. The girl that gets thrown to the ground on the other side of the clearing. Thrown to the ground when a man lunges, falling down on top of her, slavering and hissing with frenzied animalistic violence. His eyes white and his lips pulled back to fit a mouth of overgrown pointed teeth, he scrabbles at the girl, straining for her as she holds him off, her hands pushing at his jaw to keep the fangs at bay, kicking and screaming beneath him, fighting to claw her way out from under him. It's useless. He's too heavy. Too big. So very much bigger than her. And she can't hold him off for long. He presses down past her resistance, latching to her shoulder, rending open flesh the same moment she digs out a butterfly knife from the strap low on her leg. Digs it open, twists it open, and jams it nastily right into his eye. Rolling over with him as he lands on his back with a feral shriek of excruciation. Driving a sloppily whittled wooden stake into his chest to finish him off. The monster goes still with a strangled gargle and a twitching jerk. Dead. Just like that. It's over before Stiles can even break the treeline, still half propping Allison up on his shoulder, slumped into his side.

"Wait," she whispers harshly, catching at his other shoulder with bruising fingers, lifting a foot backwards to hook its heel on the bark of the nearest tree, stopping his forward momentum so he can't get farther than a step into the clearing. Her eyes aren't on the child but a ways behind her, where a group of scruffy gruff men linger by another barrel fire, swigging from bottles of Jack and warming their hands at the flames. Before he can protest, she summons the energy to shove him back into the trees by shoving herself, hitting heavily into a beech trunk together.

"Allison—"

"Shut up," she preempts, feeling haggard, sounding insistent. "Something isn't right here."

"You think?" he retorts archly, eyebrows winging as he glances from her out to the clearing.

Clutching her bleeding shoulder, mystery girl clambers painstakingly off the ground amidst the laughing jeers of the men. Swiveling slowly toward them with a dangerous scowl on her young heart-shaped face. Accusing lowly, "What the hell was that?"

"Oh, come on, kid. We're only messing around," a middle-aged blond assuages, his tone blasé and unconcerned. "You're gonna have to grow thicker skin than that if you expect to make it long around these parts."

In the trees, Allison stiffens with recognition against him, with dread and very grim confusion, murmuring thickly, "Remy."

Stiles tears his eyes off the kid to turn and look down at her. "Who?"

"Hunter of my father's."

In the camp, the girl spits back, "I've survived my entire life on my own. I don't need some douchebag mentor putting me at risk."

"This Remy," Stiles is asking quietly, not pulling her focus. "Good guy or bad guy?"

"That's debatable," Allison counters wryly, because these things are called grey.

"But he was a friend of your father's?"

"Ally," she amends. "Friend is a stretch."

"Good to know."

"He's a lot older." The furrow in her brow deepens. "We're in the future."

"_You're_ from the future."

"This is farther ahead than I've ever been."

"How farther?"

"A lot," she answers gravely, gaze going from the aged hunter to the little girl. "But in my line, Remy is dead. The nogitsune killed him before we got you back."

"Wait. Are you saying we're back in my timeline?"

"No," she says slowly, her frown full of uncertainty. "I don't think so."

"Aw. Don't be like that," Remy is replying. Doing a half-assed job of defending his actions to quell the kid's steely fury. "I bought you dinner, didn't I? Put a roof over your head."

"Think I'd rather take my chances back on the street. Thank you very much."

Black hair. Blue eyes. Pale pale skin. That attitude isn't the only thing rubbing him familiarly about this little preteen. Her voice. The tone of it too. She turns their direction, limping a little, still bleeding. Walking away as the hunter sobers from his humor, getting serious, and tosses his beer into the fire to follow after.

"Kid. Wait." He jogs a few paces, coming close enough behind her to keep his voice gruffly low but still maintain a safe distance. "You belong here with us."

To which she scoffs. Keeps walking.

Remy hardens. Turning grave. "You're an Argent. That means something."

She stops then, easing reluctantly to a halt. Turns halfway, not actually looking back at him, when she counters flatly, "That means nothing. My name is Stilinski." Pauses in a way that speaks surprising volumes. Finishes in a lower tone, "And the Argents are all dead."

When she walks off this time, Remy doesn't chase after. No one does. Allison and Stiles are still hidden in the woods, in the dark, still reeling as they watch her fade into shadows. And when he finally breaks from his shock, from being overwhelmed, when he tries to let go of the brunette by his side and move toward the distance, move toward the girl, Allison catches onto his arm and her fingers dig harshly into it.

"No," she says, pulling him back. Tight voice and white-knuckled grip. "Don't."

"What are you doing? Didn't you hear them? Don't you know who that is?"

"I know," she tells him, meeting his wide blue gaze as he looks to her, distress and a strange sense of helplessness written across his features. "_Stiles_. I know."

But when he tugs at her hold, drawn to follow, she won't let go. Instead, she drags him away. Drags him off in the opposite direction with heavy feet and a pit in his stomach.

* * *

They meet their daughter. In a way. _They meet their daughter_. Who grew up alone, a castoff, unwanted, surviving harshly in the world by becoming a hunter on her own, by killing and hiding and running and never trusting. It is a brutal thing to see. To find out. To _know_. A brutally crucial heartbreaking vision of what may come. And this is exactly why she was never going to have a kid. It wouldn't be fair. It would be cruel. But as grimly prepared for such an outcome as she always is, actually seeing it, seeing irrefutable proof that she was right all along is still a harsh blow.

That night, holed up again in another derelict room for rent they didn't pay for, Stiles watches her sink inside herself, sink into the abyss, and knows just how she feels. Or almost just. He tries to share the experience, to talk it away, but she hasn't said a word since the clearing. Eventually, his lackluster voice pushing pathetically ahead on its own gets to bothering even him, so he gives it a rest. There isn't going to be any heart to heart in the dark. That isn't how she works. For some stuff, he can coax something out of her, whether it is bullshit or not he can't quite tell yet, but this is too big. This is too much. There's nothing to say. Even he knows that.

_What is there to say to seeing your not-quite kid half grown up and haunted?_

In the silence, Allison sits down slowly on the edge of the bed, some ratty twin piece of crap shoved up against an ugly wall, and he stands hovering near the door, feeling the need to escape but not capable of leaving her like this. The drapes are drawn so the room is pitch black but for a sliver of moonlight illumination seeping in here and there through the cracks. It casts her face in pale silver and shadow. Her smooth expressionless face. Tranced. But then, without any warning, all that introverted emptiness shatters, shaking off her like a shell breaking apart, and a rough sob busts out of her. She slaps a hand over her mouth, looking horrified, but then another shakes her frame and another and she just stops caring and suddenly starts to cry, openly and uninhibitedly, because she can't control the rushing violent flood as it pours jaggedly out of her now. Sobbing in an onslaught of gut-wrenching shudders running through her, she hyperventilates for air, tears an unsteady stream soaking her face. Hunched over, gripping tightly at the edge of the bed on either side of her legs, she struggles to stifle it but can't get out from under the swell.

And if he didn't before, now he _really_ wants to run. Instead, he forces his locked up hand to let go of the doorknob it's been clutching behind him and forces his reluctant feet forward to the girl. He sits down cautiously beside her, reaches hesitantly to lay a hand on her back and rub circles on that somewhat innocuous spot, way too wary to touch anything else. After a moment, when she is uncomforted by the circles but unoffended by the contact, he inches his body a bit closer to hers and tries to hug her. This isn't welcomed. She yanks madly from his grasp and stands up before he can even get her against his chest. Faces the shuttered window. Then the wall. Slams her fist into it a few times enough to bloody her knuckles until she calms, getting herself under control while the stinging pain helps subdue the sudden hysteria, hanging her arm off it overhead, dropping her forehead to the cheap paneling as she shuts her eyes and breathes stutteringly out.

He doesn't say a word. Doesn't take his gaze off her there in the dark.

_I want to help_, he thinks. It hurts. Empathy or his own pain amplified by the sight of her, he is hurting to see her like this, hurting to know he can't help her with it. And he wants so badly to be able to help. So badly he can barely bear it.

"Everything is just so messed up," she whispers brokenly, still buried in misery against the wall as he watches her from the bed, beating off the irrational urge to hug her again, to not let her jerk free this time. He knows she needs it more, but he could use it too.

"I don't know what to do," he says back. "_Allison_. Tell me what to do."

Composed now, she pushes off the wall, straightening tall again with a shakily resolved inhale, and dries the dampness from her face before turning towards him. Their eyes lock. So very many things are exchanged in that one moment of looking at each other. Understanding and unspoken sentiments that isn't really worth anything. All the words he wishes he could find to comfort her that wouldn't mean a damn thing to a girl like this one. Empty platitudes and useless assurances to acknowledge that he knows how she feels, what she is going through, that he _understands_ all of what neither of them can say. That he just _knows_. None of it does any good, but it is still there in his eyes, and her awareness of that is there in hers. So it doesn't fix things, doesn't make it easier, but there is a sense of lessened isolation. Of the awful loneliness not being as heavy as it could be in a soul killing moment like this one tonight.

Coming closer to stand above him, in front of him, gazing down at him as he gazes up at her, Allison stays frozen there like that for a long poignant moment, the hush of darkness deafening, then touches a deceivingly delicate fingertip to the underside of his jaw. She lifts his face toward her own when she leans slowly in and breathily instructs, "Don't be shocked."

Then she does what she said she would. She kisses him again. Kisses him twice to see if there is something more than surprise or embarrassment.

With her lips still pressed firmly to his, firmly but not overly excitedly, she sits carefully down beside him on the second kiss, reclaiming the spot she abandoned, her fingertips grazing gently as she touches his face, finding the short strands of his hair before pulling across his cheeks and chin and then keeping her hands in her lap to avoid making this into something domineering when all she was going for is a mildly analytical experimentation. There is the same spark there always was. The same faint jolt when they touch, when their lips crush, a simple simmering potential lurking beneath layers upon layers of complication. But that was never in question. What she wants him to know is what it feels like to be kissed by Allison Argent. No one else.

Drawing away, but not very far at all, she lingers an inch or so apart from him, her eyes open but not widely, her lashes sweeping low. His are still closed, his lips parted just so, his expression slack but a little clouded. Whisperingly, huskily, she queries, "What did you feel?"

Stiles opens his eyes to see her face, to figure out what her game is, and to figure out what it actually is that he feels, because he honestly doesn't know. He hasn't known since that first day in the loft, since the ex love of his best friend's life came back from the dead, naked and not herself, and threw her arms around _his_ neck of all people, crushed her naked perfect untouchable body right up against his and kissed the living hell out of him while said best friend looked on in shock. He hasn't known _anything_ since that day. In a way, he thinks he hasn't gotten over the shock yet. The confusion. So he doesn't know what he felt. If he does, somewhere subconsciously, he doesn't know what he is allowed to feel, what he should feel, what he _can_ feel. It's all just a knotted mess. And that is before the baby on its way and the conflicting timelines and the alternate dimensions get thrown into the mix. Before he starts thinking about how she sees him, because she admitted herself that she sees him separately from the Stiles she was with, and yet said she loved him even if he wasn't her Stiles from her world and it wasn't the same between them, and so this is all just a whole lot of utter confusion. The kind of confusion that hurts his brain to think about. The kind there really is no sorting out. Like time travel.

Instead of answering, he pulls her in with a tentative touch to her waist and kisses her again, one hand going up to find her face, stroking tendrils of black hair off her cheek. He doesn't just sit frozen and let himself be kissed, like all the times before, but leans in and catches her lips himself, parts her mouth with his own to slide his tongue inside. Lays her down beneath him on the bed. And a voice in the back of his head is freaking out, because he shouldn't be doing this. He _really_ shouldn't be doing this. It's Allison, for one thing. Scott's Allison. Even if it's not Scott's Allison at all and is more like _his_ Allison if it's anybody's. But she is damaged and dangerous and unstable and so very vulnerable right now and doesn't need him taking advantage of her. Even if it's more like _being there for her_ than anything else. They are lost somewhere in the future of an alternate timeline and may never be getting back home. They just saw their _daughter_. Or _her_ daughter with _his_ alternate self. And the glimpse of the future _sucked_. Majorly royally _sucked_. And everything is just so messed up, exactly like she said, and so this is the last thing they need to be doing because it will only confuse matters more. And it doesn't seem right. It seems like the wrong thing to do. Except while he's kissing her, pressing lightly down on her, letting her hands drag down his back, it _feels_ like the right thing. In fact, it feels _incredibly_ right. So he ignores that stressed voice in his head until it shuts the fuck up.

But as he finds the hem of her shirt and reaches up beneath it, ghosting wide hands over each side of her sternum, she suddenly breaks out of his kiss, breaks away, shoving out from under him in a rush to get onto her feet. To which the voice comes back. Louder than ever. In a hurried panic when he has the sense jarred into him. Stupid _stupid_ Stiles.

"I'm sorry. I shouldn't've—" He stops sharp, pushed up onto one knee after she shoves him off, his other foot on the floor. Hit by a swift surge of self-recrimination. Rubs fingers over his mouth in regret as his eyes burn into the back of her. "You're pregnant for God's sake."

"It's not that," she throws quickly over her shoulder, before he can get into all the reasons why he shouldn't have done what he just did, since the list is pretty long. Her tone darkens as she says, "I told you, I don't need your pity."

He gets it. Gets distracted from kicking himself into sobering. "Yeah. You're probably right," he tells her, an odd hollow quality to his voice as he steps off the bed and crosses to the window to stand behind her. Softly. Thickly. "That's what this is." His hands brave to touch her waist then, landing just so on her curves over the loose fit of her sleeveless blouse, her leather jacket hanging forgotten off the back of a nearby chair. Using the tentative grasp, lightly swaying her toward him, he bends his head, brow brushing raven waves, bringing his mouth evanescently against her when he goes on. "I mean, why else would I want you?" And she sucks in a shuddery breath at the touch and the sound of his voice and the low provoking irony of his words. His fingers firm where they hold her, becoming a strong grip, a certain grip, pulling her body backward flush against his front. Drawing his nose along the curve of her throat, his jaw across her shoulder, mouth hovering over cool exposed skin but never touching. Until it does.

"Stiles," she breathes so quietly he hardly hears her, eyes drifting shut. Her muscles unwind, her limbs slacking as she falls back against him, lets him prop her up. Tension untangling to ease however momentarily away. Melting against him.

He puts his chin to her collarbone, dragging tresses out of the way to topple down her back, and kisses her neck as the smooth column is revealed. Presses his mouth decidedly into the skin. Over the pulse. Feels it fluttering. Hitching like her breath. Then he turns her around, using his hands on her waist to spin her, and lets go to take her jaw between his fingers and kiss her again. Kiss her properly. Deeply. Convincingly. Totally finally committed to this moment. To this _want_. Pushing her backward with his body until she collides with the wall, his grasp drops to her hips, going lower to her thighs, catching them gently, lifting them up, hooking them at his own hips, her calves coming around him, digging into him as she arches, her fingers bruising his shoulder, mouths open and wet and straining against each other. Breathlessly pushing and pulling at one another. Hungrily grasping. Clinging. One hand still curved on her thigh, he takes his other and flattens the palm at the small of her back. Uses that to hoist her a little higher against him when he pulls her off the wall, carrying her back to the bed, dropping down over her, careful not to put too much weight on her stomach.

This is surreal, and weird, if he thinks about it, so he doesn't think about it. Because feeling this way is the best thing that's ever happened to him, and this is the first time he has ever felt so inexplicably natural, and this is the lightest he's felt in a long time, in a _really_ horribly long time, like since before the nogitsune.

Because of her. Whoever she is. Whatever baggage there is between them. There is also this unwanted unpredictable undeniable _connection_ there too. This tether. And it feels good. It feels like too much.

* * *

TBC


End file.
